New site is cause to celebrate

Today is a time for celebration at ThreeSixty. After more than six months of planning and work, our new, improved website – www.threesixtyjournalism.org — launched today.

It offers more content at a glance, without requiring you to scroll far down the page. It gives more opportunities for visitors to participate via polls, discussion groups, comments and contests – and shares those comments and favorite stories with other visitors. The tag cloud on every page shows the variety of topics we cover as well as the depth of that content. We’ve made it easier for you to share our work via email, Facebook and MySpace.

What isn’t obvious is all the work required to produce this new site. A wonderful team of designers and web producers at Triangle Park Creative – Crystal Colby, Meleck Davis and Joe Shindelar – took our desire for a more robust website and built one that accomplished everything we wanted and more. It is lively, colorful, organized and inviting, with great depth of content and ease of use.

In addition to deciding everything from the shade of green to use on the home page to the right tags (Safety or violence? Beauty or fashion?), ThreeSixty’s staff needed to adapt all the content from our old site to fit this one. Every article had to be tagged by topic, links checked, quotes highlighted, photos resized.

Kate Borman, our wonderful VISTA worker, spent days going through articles to organize them by topic. Annie Nelson, our terrific youth editor, resized photos, hounded students to write their profiles and worked with teens on the great package of census stories we start this week. And our great student workers, Ben Katzner and Ka Bao Yang, filled in with assorted essential tasks.

Now we present this site to you, our readers, and invite you to do your part. Join an on-line discussion forum, comment on an article, send a favorite story to a friend. And tell us what you like about the site by emailing info@threesixtyjournalism.org We hope you love the site as much as we do. But whatever you think, we want to hear from you.