Bend Bulletin Debuts New Site (and New Print Features)

And I have to say, upon first glance, it looks much nicer than before and actually works on a widescreen setup. It has much larger photos, comments on the articles (only for subscribers, however, which is silly), There are still a few broken links here and there, and the stupid paywall is still in place, despite research that shows open archives get about 50% more traffic from Google than those with paid archives. And traffic generally equals revenue.

I haven’t had a chance to look through the entire site quite yet to see how or if other things have changed, but it’s far easier on the eyes than what was there before.

Quick glancing at the print edition this morning, it appears that they’ve introduced some new design elements to the print edition as well which URL references for specific sections (not all of which work quite yet). But kudos to the online staff over there for putting out a much better design than before — now if you could just convince management to get rid of the damn paywall and allow non-subscribers to comment, than it’d be nicer.