The Daily Californian launched its redesigned Web site Sunday evening. It was another step in our efforts to increase our online capabilities. The redesign has been in the works since July, when we had our first online summit to brainstorm new features. In addition to having a much cleaner look and feel, we wanted the site to address several key issues:

1. Improve user navigation and interactivity of our content
2. Organize the many projects we’ve introduced such as blogging, photo reprints, multimedia, Marketplace
3. Increase our online revenue-generating capabilities
4. Better feature our articles and special issues

While more papers are switching to templates from services such as College Publisher, we felt an internal redesign was a valuable training tool for all staff members. It also gives us more flexibility and control over new features we wish to implement.

Granted, it was a long process that took months of work from our online team and constant collaboration between all departments, but we are proud to have developed every aspect of the site all by ourselves–from the design, to the coding, to our content management system. Over winter break our web design team mocked up layouts for all our pages, and our online team worked on the back-end features. We implemented the code for the new designs during spring break. Please send questions, comments and suggestions about the site to sitefeedback@dailycal.org.

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