Results of Web page redesign gratifying
Most of the reaction to our redesigned monroenews.com has been positive and I’d like to thank everyone who has given us feedback.
We’re always looking for reactions to our products to help us make changes, do better in the future, etc. This is a customer -driven world we live in and we’re focused on serving readers/uses. The more comments, the better.
A number of people at The Evening News deserve praise for the new look and functionality of the site (if you haven’t checked it out, it’s at www.monroenews.com). First among them is John Castellese, our Web 
programmer, who makes it all come together. Others are Rob Gorczyca, our New Media manager, and Jim Dombrowski, our Creative Services manager, both of whom helped with the design and feel of the site.
I’ve had a few e-mails and calls that weren’t positive - and there were some critical comments on MonroeTalks.com. We’re just as appreciative of those as we are of the compliments.
But most people have been impressed with how clean and easy to navigate the site is. That was our goal. We wanted to give users a quick glance at the news, and easy tools to dig deeper.
One of my favorite new functions is the constantly changing lead photograph. It gives us a chance to highlight four or five different features on the site at the same time. For example, one of them now features a multi-media show from last weekend’s ice festival. That would have been buried deep on the old site; now it can be front and center for as long as we want to include it.
And we could make last night’s high school basketball games one of the photos, without replacing the others.
Another thing I like about the new site is that we built it largely ourselves, so we know the architecture and can make changes when we want to - and when our readers suggest that we should .
So keep the suggestions coming.