Thursday, Sep. 04, 2008

A new look on Bradenton.com

LETTER FROM THE EDITOR

Joan Krauter//jkrauter@bradenton.com
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Your home town. Your home page.

You're going to be hearing and seeing that statement a lot from us in coming days. The Bradenton Herald's Web site, Bradenton.com, is getting a whole new look this week - and it really is about "you."

It's also about us at the Herald. More and more, we're integrating all the news, advertising and information-sharing between our daily print edition and Bradenton.com. But our old online version severely limited how much we all could do on the site.

We launched the first version of Bradenton.com more than a decade ago. Think about how much has changed in cyberspace since then - and while we've added a lot of features to our site over the years, our new design will significantly expand our multimedia capabilities.

The key change: Bradenton.com is getting personal. And that is a far better reflection of the Bradenton Herald. Our newspaper is the leading source of news and information for this community, and we're going to cement that online, too.

The redesigned Bradenton.com is simplified and, frankly, cleaned up. It will offer a multitude of ways to find content quickly. How will it become more personal and interactive? You'll be able to build your own blogs and forums. You'll have more interaction and control with the story-commenting features throughout the site. You can develop your personal profiles much like you can on MySpace or Facebook.

All this allows us to interact with the community and all of our users. Bradenton.com already has almost 400,000 unique visitors every month, and we expect that number to keep growing. The redesign will encourage you to use our site as your gateway to online.

"We believe you'll come away from the redesigned Bradenton.com feeling that 'This is about me,' " says Jackie Luper, the Herald's vice president of interactive media. Jackie has led the redesign effort, and her diligence has allowed us to be among the first in our company to launch the new look.

One of the real perks, Jackie points out, is that the changes will allow us to share robust content easily with the other McClatchy newspapers and web sites, from Sacramento to Miami. One of the first examples you'll see: a fabulous section highlighting food & wine, with all of our local content buttressed by content from McClatchy sites in the heart of California wine country.

Our redesigned site boasta a new "mood" with a fresh color palate. Of course it has a marketing name: "Let's get engaged." But cut through that: It will at least generate a feeling of newness. And we hope the bolder, clean lines create a better sense of urgency.

We have already been building packages online with our investigative journalism - the most recent example is our foreclosure series. It includes a lot on Bradenton.com that we couldn't replicate in print, including interactive maps and databases. Now, as we build on the new format, you'll find far more special sections related to content on all the section fronts, with a lot of cool bells and whistles that will augment our coverage.