The new Crikey website

Having come this far, you will have noticed that Crikey has just changed its website — quite a lot — and the changes are more than cosmetic, so this is something we need to talk about.

First, here are the top 5 things you need to know about the new website:

1. You get the same number of Crikey stories but “now with extra source”. That means we also seek out the most interesting stories from across the web so you can read the best of what others are saying.
2. Crikey original articles now have the prettiest story page this side of Texas (plus they’re emailable, printable, shareable and discussable).
3. First Dog on the Moon has his own kennel.
4. There’s a Video room and a Video of the Day column for work-time distraction.
5. For Daily Mail subscribers:  You’ll be able to see subscriber-only content throughout the site as soon as you’ve logged in.

Do you have questions about the website? Our help page is here to, ahem, help.

And now, a message from Crikey editor Jonathan Green:

The first thing to say about the new crikey.com.au is that we are running a lot of material from other sources. We’ve even changed our Crikey tagline; “Now with extra source” is the new one and that’s what our new site will be full of, the best of the web. You’ll still get a taste of our Crikey originals too of course, but we’ve decided that it’s time the Crikey online presence spread its wings.

We believe that Crikey is more than just a daily independent, online news source. We think Crikey is a point of view, a filter, a perspective, a way of seeing the world. We also believe that working with the internet is all about embracing the stuff that other people do. There’s no ego in this. Sometimes a story that Crikey people have written will be a big thing on our website. More often it will be a story, or a video, or a podcast, or an interconnected series of animated infographics from some other source. What we’re hoping to do is bring it all together in one place. It’s ambitious, it will keep us busy, but we hope you will be intrigued, informed, sometimes even excited and amazed, by the choices that we make.

Some features you should know about:

Let’s start at the top of our home page, with the navigation bar. Here is a really small version of it:

Your old favourite Crikey subject categories are there, Politics, Media and Business, but we’ve created new ones to reflect the breadth of what we’re going to be covering  — that’s Environment and Life — along with a quick link to the landing page for Crikey Blogs.

Next to the right are links to handy index and gallery pages. There’s a new and quite splendid home for the Crikey Video collection — our fabled Videos of the Day and many many more, a comprehensive First Dog On The Moon gallery, an index of all our regular columns and columnists and something new, The Reading Room — a list of our favourite websites for you to explore at leisure. Have a click and explore.

On the next row are our Hot Topics.

These will change depending on what’s in the news or much talked about at any given moment. Click on a subject and you’ll head to a topic index page with stories collated around that Hot Topic theme. The Hot Topics are produced by pulling together the most popular article topics applied by the Crikey editorial team. Each article or link loaded to the Crikey website is given a series of category designations and subject tags. These all help the story find its appropriate place within the architecture of the website. The most common subject tags become Hot Topics. Click on one and check out the hot topic index page it produces. Or if you like, click on the red Hot Topics lozenge and see an index page of all the topics.

Next is our “Above the Fold” area (funny old newspaper term seamlessly translated to website design):

In the middle is our image display carousel. Just sit and watch and the images will change for you. Click on the numbered boxes at the top right hand corner and you can return to any image/link that caught your fancy.

Surrounding the carousel are headlines and links. The green headlines are Crikey original content. The black ones are content sourced from external non-Crikey sites. Click on one of these and you’ll be taken to the originating website for that story. Have a read, then come back to Crikey for more. Click on a green headline and you’ll stay within our site, and be taken to a Crikey story page:

Things have changed here too of course. To the right of the story you’ll see a number of icons, all pretty self explanatory, you can comment on the story, print it, email it to a friend of share it using your favourite social media network. Next you’ll see a series of related story headlines, all drawn from the full Crikey archive, under that, a selection or related topics, some subject tags that we think might interest readers of the original story. At the foot of the story you’ll find … so long as you are logged in, a screen where you can write a comment. Join the discussion!

Let’s go back to the homepage now, moving down a little from the above-the-fold area to the long horizontal element beneath it. This displays a selection of highlighted content, regular features and stuff that’s a little bit special. Click and explore.

Under that, are a series of what we call category boxes. Again, you’ll find combinations of Crikey original and externally sourced content, this time grouped into subject headings. The first category is politics. To the right of that main heading, are the sub-categories that we are using to further sub-divide that content.

In politics they are Australia and The World. Click around, and you’ll get the idea. Click on politics, and you’ll go to the Politics sub-home page. There are even more sub-categories and sub-category boxes here. The basic idea is to break down the content into layer on layer, each grouped around categories and tags. Every one of the category boxes works in the same way.

Let’s look over the right of the page now. First thing you’ll notice, right up the top under the navigation bar and immediately to the right of the picture carousel is a little square devoted to the Crikey Daily Mail subscriber edition.

What’s in this square will change, depending on whether you’re a subscriber or not.  If you are, once you’re logged in, you’ll be able to use this area to check your account details and read through a collection of recent email editions. If you’re not a Crikey Daily Mail subscriber you’ll see three tabs inviting you to join Crikey’s Inner Sanctum.

Moving down, you’ll come to our old friend the feature bar and under that a panel of breaking news feeds. Next is a panel of recent posts from the Crikey Blogs network and under that a feed from selected Crikey Twitter accounts.

We’re pretty pleased with the new site and hope you agree that it’s a big step forward. Click around, have a play. We promise that nothing here will bite. If anything’s strange or confusing — or if you just want to tell us what you think, drop a line to boss@crikey.com.au. We’d love to hear from you.