The Observer welcomes season with new features

If you’re one of The Observer’s eagle-eyed loyal readers, you might notice a subtle change in the look of this week’s edition. Five years ago, The Observer introduced a complete redesign of its look. This year, it was time to update that design.

Our flag, that’s our nameplate on top of Page A1, is larger, and we turned our “O” red (it’s read everywhere, you know!). Some of our type fonts are a bit more modern in look, as well.

We’ve added some new features, such as Longboat Lookback (see Page 4A), which reprints news items from years past from The Longboat Observer archives, and Sporting Life, which includes an Athlete of the Week, Sports Photo of the Week and sports scores and news. We’ll be reintroducing our popular Neighbors feature in future editions.

What used to be the Key Life section of the paper is now called “Neighborhood.” The section may have a name change, but it still includes the same categories: real estate, business, games, travel, weather and photo pages.

Diversions, our recently renamed Arts & Entertainment and Black Tie section, was redesigned and introduced in the Oct. 7 edition. Check out the new, weekly food columns by Molly Schechter.

The one thing that hasn’t changed in The Observer’s 32-year history is its price: It’s still free. And, that’s priceless in this economy.

YourObserver.com
Nearly a year after expanding YourObserver.com to include daily news updates, real estate trends, blogs, an expansive business directory, community calendar and coupons, in addition to its already comprehensive Black Tie photo galleries and calendar, The Observer’s Web site, YourObserver.com, was acknowledged for its efforts with the award for “Best Site Architecture and Overall Design” in the Suburban Newspapers of America’s 2010 Community Website Contest in June.

Since then, YourObserver.com has almost doubled its number of unique visitors and pageviews from the previous year, bringing the number of people visiting the site up from 20,000 people a month up to almost 40,000.

Much of this success is due to YourObserver.com’s creation of the Contest button in the toolbar. The Contest button leads users to the Contest page, which directs them to YourObserver.com’s successful online contests.

At summer’s start, YourObserver.com’s reporters were just beginning their video coverage. Now videos accompany many of YourObserver.com’s news stories.

Most exciting is our new way to view photo galleries. Photo galleries can be viewed in thumbnail form at the top toolbar, but you can also watch the photos in a slideshow. Click on the “Buy This Photo” button and you can purchase all photos seen on YourObserver.com in a myriad of ways.

Finally, if you’re searching for one of The Observer’s many special sections like Season magazine or Health Matters, just scroll to the bottom of the homepage and click on “Read The Observer’s Other Publications.” You’ll be taken to a page where you can browse all of The Observer’s special sections in a virtual page-flip format.

But that’s not all … there’s more to come this season.