We have a new look!

Today is a red letter day here at allvoices. In actuality, it is a no more “red letters” day.  We have just released a new user interface for most of the site. The changes are amazing! The front page hasn’t changed, but that is about the only part of the interface that hasn’t.

Red button – Gone

New report news button

Looking to report your news? No more searching for the red button. The “Report Your News” button is now blue. That is just an indication of the changes you will find on the site. The color schemes for the site are now cohesive.  Blue items and blue on the page are for news reports contributed by community members. Brown items and brown on the page are for news reports received from the various news sources around the world. (We use these for verifying your contributions.) Pinkish – purplish indicates that what you are looking at is all about a person in the news.

New page for items

We have redesigned the look of the news story pages. If you click on a news story from the front page, you will now see this:

 

Sample Report Page

 

The first thing you probably noticed is that there is now an image viewer right there at the top of the report. Any contributor report that has either images or videos attached will now start with one of these players. The viewer is designed to make it easy for you to find the media that goes with this report.  The new viewer lets you scroll through images or videos in a more coordinated manner. You can see them all here on the report page, or you can go directly to the videos or images tabs.

 

The next thing I want you to look at is below the story. Scroll down and you will find that all of the things you normally want to do with a page (share it, flag it,  see its tags, etc.) are right there with the event. And if anyone has commented on the story, you don’t need to move off this page to see the comments – it is right there. If you want to see more comments than show on the front page, you can go to the comments tab and read or add comments from there as well.

Yeah – tabs

The new tabs at the top of an report page are designed to make it easier to see how much has been reported on this piece of news. You can see at a glance whether there is more detail available. The tabs are now right at the top of your report so they are easy to get to.

 

We even have better looking tabs

 

Click on any tab and you get taken to the next new piece of the site: a better way to see related content.

The left side of the page now holds all the summary information. Who reported, where the story occurred, the story synopsis, etc. The main section of the page contains the content that is relevant to the story.

 

In each tab, the content is split into two categories. If there are contributed items related to the event, those items  will appear first with items from other sources following after. One really nice change is that if you are looking at a list of news stories or blog posts, the titles for the items now link to the story or blog post themselves.

 

Want to add your voice to the story? Look for the green plus signs. You will find a link at the top right of each tab that lets you add that type of content to the report. You can also add content from the sidebar of either the report page or the content tabs.

 

Sidebars

On the left side of the event page and on the right side of the additional content pages you will find a pair of standard sidebars. These are there to help you find additional information about the story. You can use the parts of the sidebar to:

• Find other reports and people related to this event
• Connect with the person who reported this item
• Connect with others who have added their voice to this event
• Report new events
• Add content to this event

Next new thing: Bookmarks

Want to remember a specific report for later? You can now. Just under the headline you will find the “Bookmark This Report” link. Click it and a new bookmark will show up on your profile page. You can bookmark news reports, people pages, or contributor profiles. Makes it much easier to get back to things.

 

Once you have added your first bookmark, you will find a new tab on your profile page that shows all the bookmarks you have created.

 

Profile changes

Along with the ability to save bookmarks, you now have the ability to see your viewing history on the site as well. Check out your new profile page and you will see what I mean.

 

Minor changes to your profile

 

2 new tabs have been added to your profile: History and Bookmarks. History lets you see the last 100 events, people, or profile pages you have visited.  Each entry in your history is a link to the page for that item.

 

Don’t want to see your history? No problem. Click the edit button for your profile (it is still at the top of every page). Check out the display tab… The last item there is new and lets you turn off recording of your site viewing history.

Searching by tags

When you search for a term that has been used as a tag on the site, you will now see “Tagged News”  as the last tab in your search result. This tab lists all the contributed reports which have that tag attached to the news report itself or any of its related items.

 

And even a new way to search: By tags

 

Notice that after each report found with that tag, you will see the other tags used on the report. This lets you do one click searches for related stories on different tags. For example, search for election and you find all the election news. Go to the tagged news tab and click “Sarah Palin” under any of the reports and you now see all the tagged items for her.

 

That is a nice addition, but you will find it even better when you go to report your first news item with the new site. Now, when you add a news report, you can easily get the tags for it based on the content and the title you provide. You can still edit the tag selections, but it gives you a great head start on getting your content found.

Adding content?

Adding blog posts and news stories has been simplified as well. Provide the link to the story or post and the site finds the title and the summary for you. No more cut and paste of the title in before grabbing the summary. You can still edit both pieces, but now you have a head start!

Any thing else?

The update has cleaned up some other things and fixed a bunch of known bugs. If you have emailed me in the past about a problem with the site, chances are it is fixed now. If it isn’t, please let me know. You can report things to me by email or on the new support site: allvoices.uservoice.com