Liveblog your redesign
The Grand Island Independent found a clever way to use CoverItLive, a Flash-based liveblogging tool. They’re chatting with folks about the redesign of their Web site. It’s a genius use of the tool. The conversations are public (That whole transparency thing that we love, right?) and, as Grand Island learned, allowed them to immediately fix quirks and bugs that readers found. (And, of course, the obligatory explanation that they were not going to go back to the old design — people always ask, no matter what you’re redesigning.)
But do you know what was missing? A link from the blog to the new site. (There was a link in the first entry of the liveblog, but elsewhere.)
The front page of the Independent’s site has a link to a user guide and column about the redesign. The user guide is a PDF. (Clicking on the image of the guide will not download the PDF, though. It’s a separate link to the right.) Why not walk me through it on the site? Set up a slideshow or, if you can, create a guide in Flash. There were two ways to get from the Web site to the blog: a link from the user guide page or through the blog channel, but neither adequately advertised that a live discussion was taking place on the blog. (I did ask Web editor Stephanie Romanski about it, so a clearer link may have been posted later.)
- Posted by Erica Smith at 12:05 pm / Permalink for this post
- Filed under: , blog, Grand Island Independent, live blog
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Hi Erica. The decision hold the live Q&A session was literally made the day before we went live with our new design. It’s our first time using CIL, and is still such a new tool (to us) that I didn’t even think about including it in the planning until it was almost too late!
But it’s a learning curve, as everything is online, and now that we know what a great tool CIL is, we’ll be using it more in the future as well as looking at alternative ways to help guide our readers through a site redesign.