Draft 1 of the Sports page is now online.

Please leave your criticisms, praise and other comments or questions as comments below.

Draft 2 of the Opinion page is now online.

Changes inlcude:

• Added section at upper left to display every piece from the most recent day
• Recombined columns, guest columns and contributions into 'columns'
• General rearrangement, including bringing up recent comments to encourage discussion and moving down cartoons since we don't currently have a cartoonist (Apply now.)
• Added section to display most commented pieces of all time

Please leave your criticisms, praise and other comments or questions as comments below.

I've spend much of the past three days making some changes on the badgerherald.com server that have sped up the site enormously. The two big changes were implementing MySQL database caching to prevent redundant database queries, especially from the advertising software we use, and implementing eAccelerator to greatly expedite PHP script processing.

The site has been very slow lately, partly due to the aforementioned setting not being in use, and partly due to web traffic increasing over the past few weeks (This chart won't pertain any longer once this entry is a few weeks old...):

Before the updates, top reported server load averages of 1.5-2, sometimes much higher. This basically meant people trying to view the site were put in a queue and their pages were not being instantly served. Additionally, the server CPU was consistently in use, averaging more than 90 percent use.

Now I've got the load down to an average of 0.1 or less, so content is being served up very quickly, as it should. The MySQL database caching has reduced CPU usage drastically, and we're now averaging less than 10 percent use. I'm going to continue improving performance around the site once more of it is converted to the new look.

I spent most of today working on the multimedia aspect of the website, including building the multimedia homepage (http://badgerherald.com/media), complete with monthly archives (which I'm going to add to every section) via a drop down menu at the upper right.

I added the capability to display videos next to stories just like photos. Some examples:

http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/01/25/uw_students_rally_fo.php

http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/01/23/martin_hosts_budget_.php

http://badgerherald.com/news/2009/01/25/lakeshore_emerges_as.php

I finally got a chance to implement a story e-mailing feature that allows users to send a link to a story to anyone right from the article. I also added more links to allow users to quickly submit article links to online services such as Digg and Newsvine. I realize there are a ridiculous number of services right now; I may take some down if I determine no one ever clicks them.

With the old site, we could display two photos within a story, and no captions. Though most stories have no more than one photo, I thought I could do better.

We now can display an arbitrary number of photos in the sidebar of an article. Not only can we display the photo credit, but we can now display the captions as well.

Also, as what I think is a nice touch to an article's design, I wrote a script that checks the dimensions of the top photo for a story. If the photo is sufficiently wide, it will push down the story and be displayed full width under the headline and subhead (We previously couldn't display subheads either.). Here's an example: http://badgerherald.com/sports/2009/02/04/shattuckkeepsup_el.php

No website can survive very long without changing to meet new challenges and demands, and though the Herald site has been tweaked and prodded over the years to do new things, the old site was reaching its limits.

The 2004-08 badgerherald.com had its charms. It was sleek, simple but attractive, and effective in its purpose, which was to display fewer than a dozen articles, comics and a few ads. Now that our content offering is much larger, though, we have been grappling with several major limitations.

The old site was designed to be viewed in an 800 pixel wide browser, which is quite narrow by today's standards. Consequently, we could only offer advertisers a very limited number of display sizes. We could generally only display one story across since the content column was so narrow. The widest we could display a photo, or anything, was 416 pixels. In the ultra visually oriented world we live in, that limitation had become a bottleneck to the Herald's content delivery.

Aside from the width, and without going into too much detail, the website was becoming very unruly; style information was scattered on every page instead of centralized in style sheets, bits of code from different people over the years had become unmanageable.

And on top of that, the website was more than four years old. It was time for some changes.

Planning

While I've been thinking about a redesign for some time now, I didn't start planning anything until the end of last semester. Some colleagues and I began with a list of all sorts of improvements we wanted to make to the website. We then thought about how the site should be organized and how it should work on the back end. Then I began to implement the ideas into a design.

The more people I showed the design to, the more excitement was generated, and I decided to move forward with a plan to launch a new website for spring 2009. As most plans take longer than expected, this was no exception, but the progress made seemed to many to be a great improvement on what we had, as unrefined as it was at the time and still is as I write this.

Launch

By Tuesday, Feb. 3, 2009, I had a front page designed and was ready to apply the same look as a template to the rest of the site. The design was admittedly a bit rough, but it allowed for so much more flexibility and I was pretty excited.

Over the next week, most of the website was converted to the new look in a very rough way, with much stylistic tweaking yet to be done. I've since been attempting to balance getting the entire site into the new look with going back and refining the styles that control the look of everything. There is a ton more work to do, but it's looking promising.

Acknowledgments

Early in the planning phase, I did much of my brainstorming with former managing editor Tim Williams. His exacting standards and knowledge of today's media have been a great asset to this process.

During the actual design phase, I bounced ideas off the Herald's two web associates, Alex Garens and Danielle Corona. They will be working with me in developing the website moving forward, and I've been grateful for their help.

Finally, I want to thank former editor Taylor Hughes. His insights into design and usability more than once sent me back to the drawing board, and the website is much better as a result.