On Friday afternoon, we launched our redesigned home page at Kansas.com. We think you’ll find it easier to find the stories you’re looking for, and the site more organized. Congratulations and many thanks to our site programmer, Katie Lohrenz, for a great deal of hard work to make our news site easier to use.
Here’s a note posted Friday by Nick Jungman, our deputy editor for interactive:
You might have noticed that we’ve changed a few things on the Kansas.com home page.
We’ve been working for weeks to develop a new home page for the site that is cleaner and more organized. The often chaotic jumble of information we used to have on the home page has given way to a categorized, calmer design. We think it’s a vast improvement.
But we know changes like this can be disorienting for our readers. We’ll certainly be making changes in the coming days based on your feedback, as well as extending some of these changes to other pages of the site. If you’re having trouble finding anything, or have any suggestions you’d like us to consider, please pass them along. You can e-mail us at webmaster@wichitaeagle.com or sound off in the comments below.
Many thanks to the readers who sent me some detailed examples of erroneous listings in our TV guide section the past month or so. With your help, we’ve been able to work with the company that provides our listings, Tribune Media Services, to make changes that should significantly improve the accuracy of listings each week.
TMS was able to track specific examples of incorrect listings, finding that in each case, the networks in question had changed their programming plans after we went to press with our TV section. Sometimes, the programming changed within hours of our printing.
Like most newspapers, we print the TV section well in advance of the day you receive it. TMS sends us a feed of the listings at a specified time each week to fit our printing schedule, and we discovered that significant changes were being made to programming after we printed the section. We can’t eliminate that completely — we need to print the section ahead of time to make room on the press for live news sections, and TV networks are always free to change their programming up to the last minute.
But the Eagle’s production director, Cindy Trenary, was able to shift printing schedules to nearly cut in half the advance time we need for printing the TV section. So beginning with the section you’ll receive on June 21, you’ll be getting more current listings that will capture many more of the programming changes that get made during the week.
We appreciate readers’ help in resolving these issues. Happy TV-watching.