Beta.roanoke.com: Take a look as we finish building our new ‘house’
Find our new site at beta.roanoke.com.
The big day is here – we’re ready to give you an early peek at the new roanoke.com as we build out its final stages. But before you click the link, we’d like to remind you that you’ll be checking out a beta version of our new website.
What’s beta mean exactly? Well, you’ll be looking at a site in development. Think of it as house being built before your eyes – we’ve framed it out and are hanging drywall, moving in appliances and bringing in furniture every day.
It’s a work in progress, so please pardon our dust as you come across sections shy on new content or tools that don’t quite work yet. In some cases, you’ll click through to the old site as we convert our content to the new format.
We’ll update this post with what we’re working on and encourage you to check back often to see our progress.
As we go, we hope you’ll continue to provide feedback – a conversation we began a year ago on the RefreshRT blog.
We now have new interactive feedback tool where you can not only share your comments but rate those made by others.
We’ve also produced a short video to give you a sense of what was important to us as we rebuilt the site.
On behalf of the many Roanoke Times/roanoke.com employees hard at work on this project, I’d like to thank you for contributing your ideas and helping the new site grow into an important community resource.
Editor
What we’re working on* today includes:
(Updated 02.07.13)
- Browser compatibility (Advice for iPad/iPhone users)
- Story-sharing tools
- RSS feeds
- Story archive prior to Feb. 4, 2013
Embedded video(see http://beta.roanoke.com/multimedia/video/)
- Search
Design of weather info in right rail
- Caching issues (Advice for “Service unavailable” message)
- Commenting on select stories
*Items on our punch list may not be working or may change in appearance as developers test them. Thanks for your patience!
February 6, 2013 - 12:04 PM
I love the new site. I’ve been following this for awhile. I was glad you gave us the opportunity to provide feedback. I was also a member of the RAM panel for several years. I do have one question. Where is the breaking news on the new site? I hope I’m just over looking it.
Sorry, I forgot to mention that I did watch the video and understand where te breaking news should be. I currently can’t find any of today’s breaking news stories on the new site. There are currently 8 stories on the old site.
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KR, thanks for the great feedback and tuning in during this process. The beta site will not have the exact content as roanoke.com during this phase. We are slowly adding it and training a larger group in our newsroom on how to use the new content management system. Thanks for your patience as we get up to speed.
I am liking the new look, it seems brighter, “cleaner” and “tighter” and I am not sure what that means, it is just the way the pages I looked at struck me.
It is shaping up to be a great change. Hats off to the IT Crew!
Thanks for the encouraging feedback, Sandi!