Regular visitors to this website will have noticed some changes to the home page and other templates in recent days.
This is a feature not a bug, to coin a popular IT phrase.
The new home page features custom designs to better showcase our breaking news, municipal coverage, community stories, and our news team’s hand-picked highlights, all while giving prominent placement to your favourite on-air shows and listen-now tools.
There is the new Top Story box, placed by a news person to represent the big story of the day.
The new Latest stories block is a curated list of the categories most likely to see timely updates, including closures, weather warnings, RCMP updates and more. The Municipal News block is our collection of stories encompassing all council news in our coverage area. Both of these blocks feature arrows so you can easily access the next batch of stories by date.
We have placed a renewed emphasis on showing you story categories on the home page, so you can find the content you are most interested in at a glance. Each category is a live link to all stories published with that category.
New feeds from other sites
We have also added three aggregated feeds to the homepage:
- Regional: This dynamically surfaces the stories of regional interest published in our other markets within the same cluster (in this case, the Ontario Mid-north and Cottage Country region).
- Provincial: Stories of interest to the wider provincial audience from all Ontario newsrooms.
- National: Stories of national interest from all of Vista Radio’s newsrooms across Alberta, B.C. and Ontario, as well as NWT.
Speaking of finding topics of interest, we have also added a “Topic tags” list at the bottom of every post so you can go deeper on that subject.
Our new single post template allows us to surface three related stories in the sidebar for further category investigations.
There are new templates in place for search results, category and author archives, and more, all with easier-to-read fonts and spacings.
Let us know what you think.
