Guess what? We are oh so close to making the switch from VentnorBlog to our new Isle of Wight news site, On The Wight.
There’s been plenty of challenges during the development, but we’re just tinkering with the last bits of data and hope to launch the ‘Beta’ version (this is an almost-final draft which will change slightly over the coming week as we tighten up any found bugs) of the site, very soon.
If you are wondering what the heck we’re going on about, you probably missed our series of ‘VB Journey’ articles (catch up here). They give the background on why and when we started VB, what’s happened along the way and why the need to relaunch the site under a new name.
Fresh new layout for the site
As we’ve mentioned before, it’s time for the look of VB to move on, so the layout of the site will be quite different from what you are used to with VB. We’ve spent a great deal of time looking at other news sites around the World and taken the layout of The Telegraph as our strongest influence. We think it’s one of the best designed news sites online.
One of the problems with our current layout is that it doesn’t really convey the breadth of articles published (over 15,000). We hope that the new site will give you many more routes into the content, based on subject categories and geographical relevance of news.
The home page of the site is flexible and will change depending on what’s happening in the news. If there is something we want to bring to your attention, you could see big changes to the layout on a daily basis.
Register to comment
VB has been unrivalled on the Island for community engagement. With nearly 70,000 readers’ comments and over a 1/4 million readers’ votes for those comments, it’s not hard to see why. We’ve been told that publications over the water look on with jealousy, as they view your comments as intelligent, balanced – something they’d love on their sites.
With the new site, you will need to be registered with a valid email address in order to comment. Many readers have already signed up for accounts, so make sure you grab your favourite username now by registering in advance.
Best browser to view the site with
We’re not fans of Internet Explorer and true to form, unlike most other Web browsers it’s not playing ball with the design of the new site.
We’d recommend that you consider viewing through Google Chrome [download] or Mozilla Firefox [download] to view the site on.
We hope to fix the Internet Explorer bugs sometime in the future, but it will not be a priority, so best to get downloading if you don’t have alternative Web browsers.
Thanks to our testers
Our thanks go out to the small group of Alpha testers, who have been clicking around the new site and feeding back their views. It has been invaluable and very much appreciated.
Once we launch the Beta site, it won’t be the end of the journey. We still have lots more developments planned for the coming months, but we’ll be introducing them bit by bit.
We can’t wait!
We’re genuinely excited about the changes that the move to On The Wight will bring. Can’t wait to get to hear your thoughts on it!
