We are pretty excited around The Columbian about this coming Tuesday.
It is not about the primary election, although election night does make a journalist’s heart beat a little stronger. Plus, we get pizza.
This Tuesday, you see, is the scheduled launch of our newly redesigned website, www.columbian.com. We’ve spent well over a year updating the look and improving the features of our site and testing the results. The effort probably involved nearly everyone in the newsroom, advertising and IT departments, and was led by our web developers, Mike Rogers and Chris Bjerken.
It’s a little scary to mess with our website. Though we stay loyal to our newspapering roots, these days the internet is the main way we deliver our messages. And our digital audience continues to grow. So we must give our online customers — readers and advertisers — a great experience. After looking through the development site that we have had running for a few months, I am convinced the team has done it.
As of this writing, we haven’t set the magic hour to change over the site, but it will likely be sometime Tuesday morning. We want Mike and Chris to be available, along with our web editor, Amy Libby, who is the perfect blend of gracious host and traffic cop. Since she played a major role in the redesign, I asked her to highlight some of the changes that our readers will notice right away. Here’s what she said: