Welcome to the new YoChicago

by Joe Zekas on 9/3/09

If you’re a regular visitor to YoChicago, you’re seeing many changes and much continuity from our prevous design.

Our content and our editorial approach haven’t changed. We’ve added a number of features to make it easier for you to find our more popular topics and to share YoChicago posts around the Web. We’ll be adding more as we gain familiarity with our new site.

We’re hoping you like the changes. Please chime in with your criticisms and suggestions.

Share and Enjoy:

{ 17 comments }

Levois 9/3/09 at 8:02 PM: You guys should consider making this blog Web 2.0 ready with some tools that allow us to easily bookmark individual posts. Just a thought.
Joe Zekas 9/3/09 at 8:46 PM: Levois,

You missed the icons under Share and enjoy, above.
Levois 9/3/09 at 9:58 PM: LOL Sorry! I sure did miss them.
Kevin 9/4/09 at 10:15 AM: The flickr box on the right is annoying. I was sitting at my computer and all of sudden my speakers started blaring from an Aqua video about “walking though a mine”. I have to press the pause button to keep it from going off every couple minutes. and I have to do that every time I refresh your home page

Very, Very annoying.
Joseph Askins 9/4/09 at 10:23 AM: Kevin:

The Flickr box shouldn’t be showing any videos. I think we’ve uploaded a handful of videos onto our Flickr account to test the quality of its streaming player, but I don’t think we intended those to show up in the slideshow. We’ll take a look at that.
Stokes 9/4/09 at 10:36 AM: Call it adverse to change…i like the old format.
SheridanB 9/4/09 at 10:45 AM: I like the new look too, but I’d like to be able to see more recent postings/comments listed in the side box.
SheridanB 9/4/09 at 10:46 AM: Oh, wait, my bad, it’s moved to the other side…
Joseph Askins 9/4/09 at 12:19 PM: Just an update: We set the three videos in our Flickr photostream to “private,” so they SHOULDN’T show up and start playing in the slideshow. Let us know if you’re still seeing them.
Kevin 9/4/09 at 1:59 PM: Looks like it’s fine now.

If there’s a bug, I’ll find it
Eric Rojas 9/4/09 at 11:45 PM: Keep bringing us to new and old corners of Chicago real estate and I won’t fuss about the look. Deal?
Joe Zekas 9/5/09 at 12:57 AM: Deal. But fuss anyway. We need the feedback.
Cg 9/8/09 at 1:08 PM: Oh, good to be back at work! I enjoy the new format very much. My only suggestion is to put some sort of thumbnail picture with the entry name. I am usually trying to browse through and it’s much easier to look at pictures rather then browsing titles. Just my two and a half cents… looks nice though!
Eric Rojas 9/10/09 at 11:14 PM: I agree with Cg… I’d like to see the title accompanied by photo and lead paragraph so we may browse the stories easier in the central column (like the old days). I’d also like to see number of comments for all those center column posts as well (a lot of cooments on a subject sometimes draws me in).
Alan 9/14/09 at 1:29 PM: I agree with everythiing Eric said…
Cg 9/23/09 at 1:53 PM: One more thing:
I think to keep people on yochicago.com, when you click on a link that it should open up in a separate tab or window. I think it was like this on the old web site as well? Maybe it’s a personal preferance, but it has always made sense to me to allow your page to remain open while links are clicked.
Joe Zekas 9/23/09 at 2:36 PM: cg,

Thanks for the feedback. We haven’t changed our approach.

We assume that viewers can right-click to open in a new window or tab if that’s their preference. We don’t try to keep people on the site if they prefer to navigate away from it.

We’re aware that individual preferences vary on this.