Hi! By reading this you've obviously taken an interest in KUAM's new-new-new-new-new web site. "Huh???" you ask? As the tongue-in-cheek reference would imply, this is the fifth version of KUAM.com that's rolled out the door since its inception waaaaaaaaaaaay back in 1998.
In that time our domain's gone through some pretty radical changes, having grown from a 3-page static site consisting exclusively of HTML imagemaps and RealVideo newscasts, to a dynamic news site some 2,000 pages large developed by one person - that would be me - on a 56Kbps dial-up modem on a 14" monitor, to a completely autonomous news/community behemoth requiring its own dedicated IT team, feeding off of an advanced tiered application infrastructure driven by a custom content management system we developed in-house that generates nearly a quarter of a million files.
The three redeeming characteristics that have consistently been the hallmark of KUAM.com are innovation, performance and integration. Our stuff is always cutting-edge, runs incredibly fast and is tightly coupled to its on-air cousins on radio and television. It's been a decade of tireless work that's all been focused on letting us function as Guam's premiere source for online news and the undisputed champion of Guam web sites.
It's a constant challenge to stay on top of this very competitive mountain, but it's one we welcome. (And heck, we have a great time doing it!) Our online presence isn't merely some kit we bought, being something you've seen a thousand times before; nor is it a site that instantly tells you "these guys really don't get what it means to be online". It's a homegrown product, and it works.
We invest heavily into R&D and rely on the talents of some really smart, motivated, passionate people to turn all sorts of wacky ideas into real working products you can use everyday in a variety of formats and on an expanding range of digital devices. The end result is a gallery of cool features that deliver a new dimension of the KUAM experience, letting you use our information in neat and convenient ways.
So enough waxing poetic about how proud we are of what we do. Here are some of the major features of KUAM.com 5.0:
- Blogs: You're reading one! (Well, duh.) Our "KUAM Off-Camera" weblog delivers a neat behind-the-scenes look at some of the controlled chaos that we experience everyday here at Guam's News Network, showing why we're consistently the most sought-after gig in the island's media biz.
- YouNews: we've merged our two popular user-generated content platforms - Familiar Faces and Citizen Correspondence - under a new umbrella. You're still able to upload your best field work, letting us host your high-quality images, video and text - all for free and with a twist. With social networking baked right into the product you can easily develop your media portfolio, share your contributions with the community, and make new friends with members with similar interests.
- Image Slideshows: KUAM's camera crews are out and about, busily snapping away their best shots and sending them in faster than you can yell out "Someone seriously sabotaged my Sony's shutter speed!" (Try it...I dare you.) Our new "From the Field" series features imagery capturing how busy - but still beautiful - our island is everyday.
- KUAM Video: size, as they say, matters. Our embedded video player was admittedly getting too big for its britches, so we took it off the page and gave it its own breathing space. You can now stream playlists of high-resolution presentations of all our productions, sans squinting. And since information was meant to be free, you can also share your favorite clips with friends and embed our content on your own web pages.
- Search: I've got to face reality that not everyone hits our site each and every day. So, enabling KUAM.com with powerful, fast search capabilities is key to letting people get that story they missed a couple of nights ago, or finding some obscure bit of information they're after. We've made dramatic improvements to our internal search tool, so you can find what information is important to you. Quickly.
- Tags: at the bottom of every story, you'll find descriptors having to do with that piece. By themselves they're of little consequence, but when aggregated make for a powerful way for you to quickly access related stories. Just click on your favorite tags and you'll see the stories that have to do with that topic. And with the tag cloud on our homepage you can even see what tags are popping up in our stories most, giving you a glimpse of what's making headlines at that moment. Pretty slick!
- Village Voice: our events framework's been completely overhauled to give you a new way to stay abreast of community goings-on and organizational happenings. We've cleverly laid out the announcements we're tracking, and even given you the ability to get e-mail, text and IM alerts about your favorite events, or use recurring events portably on your personal calendars on Outlook, AOL, iGoogle, iCal, MSN, Yahoo! or Facebook.
- Widgets: you can take KUAM.com's most popular content areas and repurpose them in your own applications, mashing-up our data, merging it with other information sources or transforming it in neat and groundbreaking ways we never could have dreamed up.
I'd love to hear from you about how you're using our new products, so please leave a comment below or drop me a line at jason@kuam.com. Enjoy!
Jason Salas is senior web architect and a news anchor for KUAM
posted by KUAM Blog Team @ 1:02 PM
15 Comments
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15 Comments:
Looks better than before, although it still is WAY too cluttered. There are too many features that are hardly used and rarely updated. That top logo also is kind of unappealing to the eyes as well; it sort of detracts from the overall design.
Overall, it's a step up from what it looked like before but there is much more work that you guys need to do to make it more user-friendly and accessible. I give it a 6/10.
AWESOME!!!! This is great. KUAM, can you help the local government with webbifying their agencies?
This is really neat! Thanks for giving me a lot more toys to play with and get the news! And THANK YOU for making the video bigger. It's great!
Where are the current headlines? Under "Today's Headlines" the same stories for the last 3 days have been listed there...also it is WAY too cluttered.
People come to the site for current stories...FOCUS MORE ON THAT! Features or special interest stuff needs to come secondary. SELL THE MEAT NOT THE SIZZLE!!
Hi everyone,
I'm really pleased you guys are checking out the new features! We've got some really cool responses offline about all the new gizmos and gadgets we've rolled out for you to play with, but admittedly, some people are frustrated with the new layout. We knew this was going to happen, so it's best if you take a few minutes to play around and familiarize yourself with
Essentially everything remains intact, but if you get lost, use the links at the bottom of the page to find your favorite content section. If you're looking for the current day's headlines, you can click on 'More Headlines', and/or use the number strip or 'Next' beneath the cover story to cycle through the day's top stories.
(Better yet, subscribe to our RSS feed and get the latest headlines automatically in your favorite feedreader like Bloglines, Google Reader, Safari or Thunderbird.)
Any change takes some getting used to, so if you can't find something, post a comment and let me know. We've been very happy with the overwhelming approval and support for our new redesign over the last couple of days.
I'm blog more on the new layout and changes later today, so check back soon for that. Thanks for the feedback, and keep it coming!
Jason
In regards to finding the current day's stories 'Today's Headlines' (for the third 'Anonymous' comment): if you're seeing older headlines that haven't been updated, here's a gotcha: if you're using Microsoft Internet Explorer, you may want to force your browser to clear its cache by holding down CTRL while clicking F5.
IE has a tricky way of handling page caching, so you may have to massage it once or twice to remember to display the most recent stuff we've published.
Those of you running standards-compliant web browsers like Firefox, Camino, Safari, Google Chrome, Opera or Konqueror shouldn't run into such issues, but if you do, just do the CTRL-F5 trick and all will be well. :-)
I don't know about getting lost. I think it's great! The larger video player is really neat and the layout is much better on the eyes. People just have to take the initiative and figure it out.
And...it's ALL about the sizzle. Sheesh.
Jason, one thing I like A LOT about the new site is the fact that the site keeps the most important items "above the fold". I enjoy this layout much better than scrolling downward for miles.
I'm not crazy about ads, but I realize you've got bills to pay. KUAM's still light years ahead of everyone else on island on the web, so keep at it.
Good work. Don't pay much attention to people who don't get it...some folks just aren't smart enough to use the Internet.
[[ FRESH OFF THE AIR AFTER DOING THE NEWS ]]
Hi everyone! (And hi Guamie.)
Be nice now...not everyone gloms the site right off the bat. If the experience of doing web development and marketing has taught me anything over the last 13+ years, it's that not everyone picks up a technical product at the same pace. Some will instantly get it, with others it may take awhile longer. So that's what I'm here for.
But I'm stoked you picked up on our above-fold design philosophy this time 'round. That's precisely the effect I was going for...loading all the critical information on a single screen length (assuming most people run monitors at a 1024-x-768 resolution).
You've made my day by noticing it...and approving!
So thanks!
I love the multimedia. The videos and image galleries are great! KUAM rocks!
Wow! The site looks great! Are you using Big Medium (Content Mangement System)? We are thinking about using it as well for one of our projects. The new video player you have now is tons better!
Keep up the good work!
Thanks everyone! Glad you like it. (And yeah, the video player's been HUGE hit.)
The URLs are also much nice with this version!
How do you like Big Medium (CMS) so far? I was hesitant about the use of flat files for its database but it is likely good enough for what we need. Was it easy to get it going side by side with IIS? How are you handling searches for older stories and content that are not on the Big Medium version? Thanks again! Keep up the good work!
Thanks! We're enjoying Big Medium very much, too. It's vastly more powerful than the Arpeggio CMS I built for KUAM years ago, and it's helped to decentralize the publishing function and let us cleanly separate more on content development and multimedia enhancements.
We actually evaluated several open- and closed-source CMS platforms, including Ellington, and several Rails-based and Python-based web frameworks like Django. We even considered messing with WordPress and possibly Joomla. Big Medium had the feature set we were looking for, and it integrated with our back-end nicely.
I'm keen on our revamped format because we can let the CMS manage our stuff and publish in rapid-response fashion as we've always done, and I can still build custom apps and utilities in .NET.
As far as legacy content, we've got a custom Google searchbox that does sitewide searches just for our domain, and I'm right now in the process of doing an XML web service that bridges our archived content with the newer stuff. It's going to be really cool!
I've discovered that there's at least one other Guam organization using Big Medium (the local Seventh-Day Adventist Clinic).
Send me some URLs of the things you're working on. I'd love to check out your projects, too. :-)
Cool! Yeah we've tried SiteFinity a while back .. it is probably much improved since then.
Will you be moving completely to Big Medium or will you be keeping Arpeggio running side by side? Is it just a matter of migrating content from your SQL db to BM's flat file format. I'm guessing that would be all you would need to move completely out of the old version? If this is true, you won't need to do a custom search for archived content.
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