This weekend, CHS joined the robust community of independent news sites utilizing the WordPress publishing platform. We’re excited to present a new site experience that we hope will be faster and easier to use.
Improvements!
- Improved speed and site performance
- Better pictures
- Stronger mobile experience
- Simpler layout
- Easier to use community calendar
- Improved community publishing
And probably lots of other stuff!
For most readers, it is business as usual. Your arrive, you scroll, you click. For more engaged CHS visitors, you’ll find changes in getting things done like posting new calendar events or news items you want to share. The calendar is ready to rock — jump in add your items today. We’re in the process of moving the rest of the items from the old calendar but go ahead and re-create an event if you don’t see it yet. We’re still ironing out a few things on the community publishing end of things but, in the meantime, you can let us know about anything newsworthy here.
Take a spin through the rest of the site — including seven years of archives — and let us know about anything that needs fixing. You can leave a comment below or send mail to us at [email protected].
Looks good, though I’m seeing issues with the calls to api.flickr.com in some endless loop.
Also worth noting an old URL for the CHS RSS feed (http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/rss/2.0/rss/default/featuredposts.xml) still works but goes to the CD News site.
Google Reader, meanwhile, is having trouble with the new CHS RSS at http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/feed/
The RSS issue should be fixed (my bad!). Let us know if you’re still having issues. Thanks.
Site performance is quite bad on my end. I get that it’s advertising supported, but the ad column on the right is miles long, with some of those images being over 1MB each: http://imgur.com/Oa1jxvF
some teething pains for sure, but all in all it’s really great to see the site on a well-known platform.
Thanks for checking out the new digs — I think we’ve found a few of the problems that were slowing things down. Hope you see improved performance.
Nice! It looks good in Chrome, will check it out in a few other browsers, but wordpress is easy to use and certainly has the ability to make clean looking websites.
My Google Reader got spammed with old stories going back to “Kids move here and they seem to be attracted to neighborhoods with old buildings” on March 5th, and none of the photos in the stories are showing up in the feed. Also, some of the photos on the site itself squeeze right up against the text, at least in my browser.
Sorry about that. I assume that’s a one-time problem and things should be smooth going forward for our RSS friends.
Congratulations on your successful campaign. Site looking and loading fine in Safari. Was expecting more of an external makeover but it’s what’s inside that counts.
Thanks :) We had so much work to do moving to a new system in this update that we decided not to bite off more than we could chew by trying to reinvent the look and feel. Goal was to achieve a similar feel to the old site.
At first look, I like the new format…thanks Justin! One thing is that the pics are of much better quality.
Some recent posts seemed to have been dropped in the transition…one is “Sorting out…” (about The Social) and another is “City Council member…” about Tom Rasmussen.
Thanks Calhoun — everything moved to the new site (most everything!) Try search if you can’t find some of the older posts via the homepage and browsing
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/?s=apodments&submit=Search
Here are the two posts you were looking for
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2013/03/sorting-out-what-happened-at-the-social/
http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/2013/03/city-council-member-inspired-by-hill-pushback-considers-microhousing-moratorium/
Justin, just an FYI…both those posts were from March 8th, and neither one made it into the “new edition” of CHS. There was bound to be some problems with the transition, and this seems to be one of them. But thanks again for what must have been a huge amount of work to get the new version online.
I’m confused, Cal. Links above work. Posts are here on the new site. What am I missing?
It’s possible that it’s me that is missing something….yes, the links work, but I scrolled back (on the main pages) to March 8th and those two threads are missing. Maybe they are availably only by the search mechanism?
Yeah, the index poops out around there but all the posts are on the site. Give the site search a rip — it’s not too shabby. Wonky types, let me know if you think we should switch to Google search from the WordPress solution we’re currently using.
Long story, short… search is your friend!
Congratulations
Looks good, Justin.
Noticed one thing: On the North Seattle shooting story (from Friday & Saturday) – the Updates did not show up with the original story.
I noticed same thing! We have to figure out a solution for those post types from CHS past. Some big breaking news stories from past years kinda leave you hanging right now. Good news is biggest ended up with summaries of all the updates at top but, yes, we have an UPDATE problem. Good catch!
well I for one am loving this new format already. The old setup wouldn’t work with the firewall at the office. This one loaded just fine and dandy. Great job!!
At least one satisfied customer :)
looks good … does the site have a mobile version now?
This *is* the mobile version. We’re hoping we pulled the right levers to create an experience across multiple device types. Mostly not a fan of the stripped down “mobile” experiences so hoping to avoid. But you can let us know!
Generally very nice but the line spacing on the paragraphs could be increased a point or two to increase readability.
The posting of events to the calendar is really nice and works great. Easy to add details and an image. Nice work!
Good work. Still my fave local site and finest tool to offer our hotel guests.
[…] Coming soon will be an open system to let people post articles as well as events. And, yes, we’re working on restoring the free CHS Classifieds section, too. In the meantime, good luck on Craigslist! It’s all part of our new site rollout earlier this week. You can learn more about that here. […]
The calendar is slick! What plugin did you use or was this custom built for you?
One tiny little thing, it looks like here in the comments layout the “post comment” button is aligned a little too far to the right. It is hanging over the grey area by about 5-10px.
Other than that, everything looks really awesome. Keep up the good work!
the calendar is here: http://time.ly … just found it the other day myself while working on a project for a client.
Thanks!
This page’s layout seems pretty wonked-out: http://www.capitolhillseattle.com/shop-the-hill/
So happy it’s back.