New Syracuse homepage

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Permalink Reply by Brian Cubbison on June 10, 2008 at 6:54pm

Launch should be Wednesday or Thursday. The astronauts are suited up and waiting.

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Permalink Reply by Brian Cubbison on June 12, 2008 at 11:29am

The new homepage is up now at http://www.syracuse.com

Critique away. We're supposed to test-pilot it and find any issues.

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Permalink Reply by John Kroll on June 17, 2008 at 7:06am

Aesthetically an improvement. But I've been wondering what kind of users go to a home page to get an index. We've been producing a lot of Web content, including print stories that break first online as well as online-only video, audio, Flash, text -- and there's not a lot of room on this home page to tell users about it, or to promote special projects, or even individual stories, that have a lifespan of more than a few hours.

I can't recall seeing any other news site that has so signficantly reduced the number of headlines on its home page. Anyone else?

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Permalink Reply by Brian Cubbison on June 17, 2008 at 10:00am

John, you've hit on the key question. It's a move in a definite direction, for sure. Without taking sides ... the thinking seems to be that if you're the kind of person who wants all the latest headlines, you'll probably bookmark the news blog and go there often. If you go to a homepage like www.syracuse.com, you're probably looking for an area of the site: Classifieds, or a columnist, or high school sports, etc. Meanwhile, you get the top news plus a more thorough way to navigate. It's definitely not as much of a "front page" metaphor, and it probably incorporates a little of the idea that every page is a homepage. But we, too, are figuring out how to package something so we can link to it from the homepage.

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