In the past year, I learned more about the management of our website than I had in all of my prior time on staff put together. The editor who had done most of the work on it had graduated a few years earlier, so when this year rolled around and we decided it was time to redesign the site, the other editors and I had to learn to fully use it ourselves. Through a series of lunches where we worked through the period, we taught ourselves how to work on the site.

At the JEA/NSPA Fall National High School Journalism Convention in Washington, D.C., some other members of the Crossed Sabres staff and I participated in a web critique. The experience gave us a lot of good places to start with our redesign since we were able to get feedback on everything from the flow of our site to the smaller graphic elements. I remember we couldn’t stop talking about all our ideas for the web redesign on the Metro ride home, and I had filled multiple pages in my notebook with notes from the critique.

When we taught ourselves how to work on our website, we started with some bigger changes we knew we wanted to make. We removed the harsh lines that we had previously had around the different sections on our homepage that had made it look cluttered, and instead went for a more simplistic and clean look with white space. Our showcase section at the top had been a grid of the five most recent stories in that category where the images tended to get cut off. We switched to a scrolling gallery with a darker box for the headline. Immediately we could see an improvement in the design of our site.

Learning to use our website in order to do the redesign we’d been planning for so long was certainly a challenge. The site had never been my strong suit, but knowing what I do know and having made the changes that I helped to make, I can definitely say that I appreciate the work our Web Editor puts into maintaining it more.

To look at our website, please click on the following link: www.crossedsabres.org