Website refresh surfaces more of your important local stories

Regular visitors to this website will have noticed some changes to the home page and other templates in recent days.

This is a feature not a bug, to coin a popular IT phrase.

The new home page features custom designs to better showcase our breaking news, municipal coverage, community stories, and our news team’s hand-picked highlights, all while giving prominent placement to your favourite on-air shows and listen-now tools.

There is the new Top Story box, placed by a news person to represent the big story of the day.

The new Latest stories block is a curated list of the categories most likely to see timely updates, including closures, weather warnings, RCMP updates and more. The Municipal News block is our collection of stories encompassing all council news in our coverage area. Both of these blocks feature arrows so you can easily access the next batch of stories by date.

We have placed a renewed emphasis on showing you story categories on the home page, so you can find the content you are most interested in at a glance. Each category is a live link to all stories published with that category.

Speaking of finding topics of interest, we have also added a “Topic tags” list at the bottom of every post so you can go deeper on that subject.

Our new single post template allows us to surface three related stories in the sidebar for further category investigations.

There are new templates in place for search results, category and author archives, and more, all with easier-to-read fonts and spacings.

An additional cool feature we have added dynamically pulls stories from all of our other Alberta newsrooms. Titled “Provincial,” the home page block features stories deemed worthy of sharing by our reporting team from all corners of Alberta. We have done the same for our National stories.

Let us know what you think.

John K. White
John K. White
John is the Director of News for Vista Radio. He has more than 30 years of experience in journalism, with an early eye cast to digital news innovations. He attends the Online News Association conference every year to learn about the cutting edge opportunities for his team to adopt and adapt.

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