About the new website

The new Heights Observer website (coming soon) is built on the open-source Wordpress content management platform, offering capabilities that weren’t available when the old platform was designed nearly 20 years ago.

Meaningful changes include:

Responsive design: It works on desktop and mobile screens.

News-style home page: Allows displaying multiple article headlines and excerpts for a better view of what’s new without endless scrolling.

Three menus for clearer navigation:

• The main menu, at mid-screen, is all about news and content; it’s for use when visiting the website as a reader.
• The service menu at top left is for doing business with the Observer: Advertising, donating and getting info about the publication.
• Items on the service menu at top right are for contributing content.
  
  

The mobile site lets you scroll articles, just as you’d expect, with a single hamburger menu at the top (that’s what web developers call the familiar 3-bar icon used to identify the modified menu common on mobile screens).

Social media: Unlike the old site, the new one plays well with social media, meaning broader reach and better presentation for the information we publish.

We expect these upgrades to increase traffic to the website, and to provide a more viable option to present content that doesn’t make it into the print edition. With that said, we will continue to publish the weekly e-newsletter and, of course, the monthly print edition.

This technology will increase demands on the time of our small staff, meaning new opportunities for volunteers to participate. We’ll be looking for people who are interested in doing anything from maintaining the website and user base to promoting content through social media to coming up with new content ideas.

Look for more information in the days and weeks ahead.