Today, our California Watch website gets a new look. Our upgraded site includes easier navigation and an emphasis on enhanced reader engagement.
We first launched our website in January 2010 and have steadily grown our traffic. We’ve picked up a couple of prestigious awards along the way – including an Online News Association award for general excellence and a National Headliner Award for best online-only website.
Despite the accolades, we think we can do better.
Help us do more.
Astute readers may have noticed the changes on Sunday. We soft-launched our site over the weekend and wanted to make sure we had caught any bugs before making today's formal announcement.
The changes move us forward. You’ll continue to find our terrific investigative journalism under the new Spotlight label and our enterprise news posts as part of our Daily Report. Nothing about us has changed philosophically. But we really wanted to upgrade the viewer experience and our readers’ ability to interact with us.
Our new commenting system is more robust. We've made it easier to create a dialogue around our stories. Readers will be able to easily post their comments on our page and on their Facebook pages. Tweets about our stories will be added automatically to our comments section. This connection of social networking platforms will create a louder megaphone or bigger venue for debate and discussion about stories. Additionally, we have improved our filters to ferret out annoying spam.
We’re also launching a React & Act section that includes upcoming events and more ways to participate in our journalism. We plan to hold more chats and discussions around our stories. With greater frequency, we're going to be reaching out to readers across the state and country using the Public Insight Network. The network, which we joined last year, enables our reporters and editors to tap into sources and draw them into our reporting efforts. And if you see an error on our site, we're making it easier to report a problem directly to me and to Senior Editor Robert Salladay.
We think the site will make it easier to find our good content. Each weekday, we will include “Today’s Keywords,” designed to direct you to our latest stories and features. We'll alter the phrasing on the weekends to "Don't Miss" to call attention to a database, video, multimedia feature or news post.
Our health, environment, public safety, politics and education topic pages are much richer and deeper. They now include more news and enterprise reporting. And if you want to find all of our investigations, you can go to our Spotlight page, which lists every major story we’ve produced since we published our first piece in September 2009.
When we launched our site initially, we got a lot of positive feedback about the clean, simple look of our pages – and about how easy it was to reach our staff or to learn more about us and what we were working on.
We’ve made sure to continue that. But we think you’ll find the site is even cleaner today.
On our home page, we’re now aggregating big stories from our growing list of California Watch Media Network partners, including the San Francisco Chronicle, Sacramento Bee, Orange County Register, San Diego Union-Tribune, Bakersfield Californian, Fresno Bee and Press-Enterprise in Riverside.
Web producer Suzanne Yada helped lead our redesign with valuable input from our digital, reporting and editing staff. The site was designed by East Coast firm Hamilton Hughes Design. Kathryn Benedicto of Happy Snowman Tech, a Bay Area business, developed the site for us in Drupal.
We’ll keep refining things as we go. So please let us know what you think.
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