Chonicle Online Gets Facelift!

Written on October 16, 2007 by diesel

Centralia’s Local Newspaper Hits The Web

Centralia’s local newspaper, The Chronicle, which has been in publication since 1889, offered a free online version on October 15, 2007. The Chronicle serves all of Lewis County and is published as an afternoon print edition Monday through Friday, and a morning print edition Saturday. It has no Sunday edition.

How is look?

I had a chance to review the new online Chronicle yesterday and today. The layout is easy to navigate around with links to Sports, Local News, Classifieds, Opinions, Blogs, Forums, Obituaries, and Multimedia.
The site is still being developed with a few of the images not loading and a few links not quite working. They are also working on the blog section. Overall though, the site was very informative and a great improvement over the online “subscription only” based site they had before.
Rick Pierce, the IT Administrator with The Chronicle, did a great job balancing advertising while keeping the real focus on the content.

Here’s What Gets An A+

The Multimedia section is a great idea for the Chronicle to step into the age of “YouTube” and expand on how news should be delivered. Like they say, a picture is worth a thousand words and a video can be priceless.I really liked the videos and think that Nick George did a fantastic job.

The Layout of the site was also done very well with navigation being used to easily locate information. No dropdown menus to get in the way of the news. No heavy use of flash and great flow.

Things To Change Or Consider

Overall, The Chronicle did a great job. There are just a few suggestion that I think would help with the usability of the site.

Having a list of events for the next 7 days in the sidebar instead of the calendar would be alot more useful than having a calendar with a highlighted date.

The Obituaries section needs to be styled like the rest of the site. Once you go there you think you are back on the old Chronicle site. The guestbook was a great idea though.

Offer a RSS subscription so that people can have it added directly to their RSS readers or email without having to check in with The Chronicle to see when new information has been posted.

Downloadable or at least embeddable multimedia.

I would like to see The Chronicle continue and expand their online version of the paper and keep it free. Go ahead, use the extra space in the sidebar and put up some ads. It’s a newspaper and a website, we’re used to it.

Hats Off!

Great job with the redesign. I was not a big fan of the old design, but will now become a reader of The Chronicle online. Everyone reading this, check out The Chronicle, I am sure you will become a fan also.

Posted in news

If you enjoyed this post Subscribe to our feed