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Monday, May 21, 2012
What is wrong with The Sacramento Press?
by Ben Ilfeld, published on October 16, 2008 at 12:44 PM
Storyline: Feedback
The Sacramento Press is an amazing tool. Our development team built the site from the ground up to be clean, fast and useable. But most of all it is a flexible platform. Why the focus on flexibility? Because we know that we will not get everything right the first time around. We know there are bugs. We know there will be usability problems and design flaws. We need your feedback. Our goal is to be responsive and flexible, not perfect. We strive to be always better.
Our operations are also designed to be responsive and flexible. We want input on how to make our terms of use better. We need your feedback about our privacy policy. We have posted both as storylines on the site so that you can comment on specific terms and begin the conversation.
Up and down our operation our goal is to meet your needs and exceed your expectations. In order to serve the public we need an open conversation with you. Please join me on this storyline and give us feedback. Just add your comment to the conversation section below. What do you like about the site? What is worng with the site? What plainly does not work? How can our terms or business model be better?
We pledge to be open, honest and transparent. As Operations Manager for The Sacramento Press, I pledge to be active in conversations about our site and operations.
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debate, and be heard with those in your area closest
to the issue.
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Our plan is to test our product and get feedback with a small group of writers and readers first. We do this by limiting our marketing efforts and focusing coverage on just one small neighborhood.
Over the next few days, we will ramp up slowly while learning from this target group what we are doing right and what we can do better. During this time we will invite an ever expanding group to test the site. The amount of content will be low. Our goal was to have around 30 active contributors posting comments and writing articles. So far we have met this goal on the dot.
Then we will begin a larger marketing campaign, but only in our initial coverage area. If you live in or around the Southside Park neighborhood I am sure you will hear from us. We want to get lots more writers and readers, but focus our efforts in a small area of town. We will still be a "beta," or testing, release.
For more information on our coverage area, see:
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/256/Our_coverage_plan
For more information on what I mean by "beta," see:
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/251/What_is_Beta
Over the next three months we have a marketing and editorial plan that works on the ground, neighborhood by neighborhood, to eventually cover all of midtown and downtown. Our goal is to cover these areas with much more frequent updates by February.
So that's the plan for the next few days, the next few weeks, and the next few months. If the plan goes as well as it has so far and we can work with our contributors to make our product better, then we will keep improving The Sacramento Press as we grow and generating more and more content.
Whew! I know that was a long winded one, but I want to let everyone know the plan. Thank you for the question.
I just wanted to know if there is a means to:
change or add photos to a published article
a Calendar Page to simply announce events?
a way to search on help functions?
Thanks,
Jennifer
For now, you can see the Terms of Use storyline storyline:
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/23
It has the current copy. The terms are broken up as different articles; use the green "storyline" tab on the right edge of the page to flip between the different sections of the document. If there are any comments or questions you have with the current copy, or see a way to make the terms better, leave a comment under the appropriate section.
Second, the icon you see for bookmarks is called the "favicon" (this is short for "favorites icon"). We did not design one at first, but this weekend a graphic designer is working on it. Not only does it show up in bookmarks, but many modern browsers use it in tabs and next to the web address.
In both cases, thank you for your help. Each issue we discover and fix now will make for a better user experience for all as we grow!
We also now have favicons. If you don't see the favicons still it's probably because they are cached. This means your computer has stored the empty icon. Over time you will see the favicon.
I am extremely happy with the performance of our search engine, but right now it only searches articles and headlines. It does not search for authors or the contents of profile pages. We have a long way to in terms of building our search engine to full capacity.
I do consider this a serious design flaw in the current version of the site. We are working on the best solution to make search as easy and fast as it can be while including more of the writing on the site.
"I click it - eager to learn how to write for Sac Press - and it doesn't go anywhere. And then I throw my computer out the window."
Hmm, that sounds like an expensive problem for him.
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/243/What_is_a_storyline
RIght now you can find a lot of answers to your questions by clicking "help" on the green bar at the top of the page.
I would like to create a comprehensive user guide. And I want to have more help videos. For now, if people use the site and see it as a normal online newspaper, I am happy. Hopefully people will blissfully discover features that work just as they wanted. OK, that's a little optimistic. The theory is that we want to give people a chance to have an uncluttered, simple experience and grow to use more of the advanced features over time.
Well, I'm off to write more about how to use the site.
1. The ability to track all comments for any writer.
2. a quick way to see what is new in conversations you've participated in.
We will be working on it. Thanks!
Ben, on that subject, also a feature that would inform me when someone has responded to my comments/responses. This could maybe be done with an email sent to me, or some kind of alert upon logging in.
It may be two or three months out. I will try to keep you up to date.
i kept getting a system error (can't recall the exact message) when publishing
now i'd like to go back and edit what i published to add a couple more photos but can't seem to do it
was difficult to embed images in the body that had been uploaded, (by the way the flashing photo slide show is a bit annoying)
and i'd like to add another tag but can't seem to edit it once it's published.
finally shouldn't there be a field for a teaser?? you know, title, teaser, body?
thanks, other that that the site is great....
We do not offer the ability to edit published articles. Perhaps we will, but it was a design decision I had a hand in. We give the opportunity to add to the storyline and felt that was the best way to add more photos or follow-up on a story. However, we have had problems with people making some formatting mistakes and wanting to go back and change something. For now, contact us at support@sacramentopress.com and we can make changes as administrators.
In order to embed an image, the image must be hosted on another site. I noticed that you linked to an image on our site ant that caused the error. If you have a flickr account or some other photo site you can copy the image address from that site in order to post an in-line image.
The slideshow has a simple purpose. We designed the system to be as easy as possible and in-line images are more difficult to train a new writer to use. We left the option of in-line images for advanced users, but felt a simple slideshow would be appropriate for most stories. We left out captioning at the last minute because it did not work well when we tested the system. We are working on building out a better version in the next couple of months. Hopefully there will be an easy way to give you more options about how and where your images are displayed.
You can always add more tags to a story. Just go to the article and click on the "your tags" field below the rating and flagging buttons.
As for a teaser, that is a good idea. We never really thought of it and I'm not sure how we would use it yet or implement it. It would mean possible design changes across the site. I will look into it.
http://www.sacramentopress.com/headline/346/What_is_RSS
Whats up with the search feature?
What posts are you concerned that we have censored? Please feel free to contact me directly about your concerns: geoff@sacramentopress.com
As far as the search feature goes, we have had a significant problem with our in house search and have temporarily substituted a Google search feature for it.
http://www.sa4mayor.com/2009/04/sa-tonight-you-made-history/ can you contact me off site?
We are looking into connecting out site with social networks and making things much easier to share.