Dear readers:

Thanks very much for your patience during the past week as we’ve been working out the glitches that occurred during our website redesign.

We still have a few more wrinkles to smooth out, but I want to assure you that the reason for doing this — in the end — is to provide you with a better user experience. This website began years ago as a “blog post” format — meaning that stories appeared in the order they were posted, with the newest story first. A few years ago, we shifted to more of a “newspaper-style” design format, with categories for our various stories appearing by section on the site.

While some readers did like this format, it quickly became clear to us that most people simply want to see the latest news first — without trying to figure out which category a story may have appeared in.  In addition, nearly 70% of our readers view our site on a mobile device — tablet or phone — and the newspaper-type layout is not effective for them.

So we have returned to our roots, so to speak.

Of course, every change comes with unintended consequences. Please know that I have been diligently making note of your comments and concerns and passing them along to our web developers.

I sincerely appreciate your understanding.

Teresa Wippel
Publisher