The blog is well done for the limits that a blog can do. Immediately when you go to the blog you see that it is a community driven. It leads you to other stories that are affecting the citizens of whatever community you decide to look at. On the left it also lists the recent comments, the categories, and most recent posts too. The front page has the most recent important story and as you scroll down you see the top stories from other communities as well.
I think the website is actually pretty good for being a small newspaper that is hyper local. This seems like it’s a very local version of “The Quick” that the Dallas Morning News does for their paper. For one thing I really like that they didn’t flood the page with ads, there are two ads that are well placed on the page and not in the way. They have links to following them on twitter or becoming friends with them on facebook. There is a main story on the page with links below it to other stories and then one link that lets you see more stories.
The most important stuff that people will come to the site to do, like posting news, photos, videos, and other things is right at the top and the colored blocks draw your attention to it as soon as you open the site. They also have visible picture links of all their blogs. It also encourages people to talk to the editors. Having a simple step-by-step search engine at the very top makes it easy to navigate through the site. You just type in where it says and you are there. I don’t think they really need to change anything. Even though its simple, for the people that will be accessing the site I think it needs to be that way. Maybe as they continue to grow you can add different things to the site. For now though, it works and works well.
