“Cleaning up the clutter that had grown like weeds” was the reason at the top of everyone’s list for April’s redesign of sacbee.com, according to Interactive Director Ralph Frattura. The Web site run by The Sacramento (Calif.) Bee (daily, 290,387; Sunday, 331,905) hadn’t seen a major redesign for four years, and anyone who has run a growing site knows that as new features are added, they aren’t always integrated as cleanly as earlier in the site’s development.

The redesigned site reflects the paper’s desire to cut clutter and to showcase The Bee’s award-winning photography.

The Sacramento Bee’s recent Web site redesign better highlights the staff’s constant updating of news and other content.
 

The staff also wanted to more clearly highlight the 24/7 news content being produced by the company, Frattura said, citing lead designer Seth VanBooven and technology lead Martyn Adair for their efforts.

“I still have the flip chart pages from those (site redesign) meetings folded up in my ‘redesign’ folder,” Frattura said.

Flipping pages

A dozen Bee employees were asked to evaluate the initial design, but ultimately found it too challenging, Frattura said. That design was scrapped, a new one put in its place and it evolved internally into what is currently seen on the site. That evolution included the addition of embedded content that flips and changes regularly, something that’s prominently featured on the site’s pages.

“Our version of the flipping content pages was expanded from approaches we saw at AOL, Comcast and Boston.com,” Frattura said. “It allowed us to bring much more content to the home page and showcase five times as many photos as a static home page. We were pleased to [have the ability to] let readers customize the home page content, set the speed of the changing page or stop it altogether, and include RSS feeds.”

That final design was then shown to a dozen members of the public, who gave an hour’s worth of feedback on the site in exchange for a payment. The feedback was excellent, and The Bee surveyed site visitors again roughly a month before the redesigned site went live.

What makes Bee buzz

The site’s tabbed pages are created using object-oriented Ajax (asynchronous JavaScript and XML) HTTP request code, according to Adair, which alleviates the problems encountered when loading multiple pages simultaneously with Ajax.

“In this regard it’s a dynamic SSI include, utilizing simple page builds from our publishing system,” he said.

The custom tab settings are JavaScript controlled and hold the settings in a cookie. The RSS tab in the custom field uses object-oriented Ajax tied to a back-end perl CGI program, which grabs the requested RSS URL and passes it back as XML, with some simple error validation. RSS entries are stored in a cookie and JavaScript parses the cookie and creates the inline HTML, using DHTML.

According to Adair, the core online publishing system was adequate for the new site’s designs and capabilities. The Bee uses Unisys’ Hermes front-end editorial app for print publishing.

“Our [online] publishing system, McClatchy Interactive’s Digital WorkBench, required only minor changes in templating,” he said. “By using Ajax rather than a system-centric approach, we sidestepped any conflicts.”

Reader comment support

New technology was incorporated for the reader comments section, where site users can add feedback to any story in the site. Several new tables were created in the main MySQL database, new JavaScript classes were written, and administrative and user APIs were written in mason/Mod_perl. Ajax is again tapped to pull the comments to a story page with the option of having a separate comments page or including them inline.

Sacbee.com moderates user comments, but does not edit them. Staffers screen the comments for  unacceptable language, which include hate comments, personal attacks and libel.

Sacbee.com’s interactive elements notwithstanding, the site’s main mission is to support the paper. To that end, The Bee’s newsroom oversees news and information.

When the paper is first posted online each day at 6 a.m., the stories mirror The Bee’s print product.

Throughout the day newsroom editors, working with online content manager Linda Ash, adjust the play as new stories are reported and written.

24/7 coverage

“The newsroom has become very serious about 24/7 coverage in the last six months,” Frattura said. “[This included] adding an assistant managing editor and content editor for interactive as well as a reporter. It looks like there’s even more commitment to come.”

The basic content flow, however, hasn’t changed much in the 10 years since sacbee.com was launched - just the amount of content, particularly in recent months. Locally, Frattura said the Sacramento market has seen a “slow news year” so far in 2006.

“So far, the biggest story we’ve seen online has been the Sacramento Kings’ trade of Peja Stojakovic to the Indiana Pacers for Ron Artest, noted basketball ‘bad boy,’ in late January,” he said. “The trade was a strange tale, spanning 48 hours, and it drew a lot of local and national traffic.”

The forums and story comments were just launched with the recent redesign, so Frattura said it’s still a bit early to gauge their level of user acceptance and participation.

To support the site’s advertising efforts, print ads are adapted for an online Marketplace section, powered by apps from HarvestInfo Inc. and Planet Discover.

The paper is in the first year of posting all display ads, Frattura said.

Print, online options

Kelly Shively, online advertising manager, said Sacbee.com and The Bee itself provide a comprehensive option for advertisers.

“The more distribution points a media company is able to extend to an advertiser, the more value is delivered to the advertiser,” she said. The site has its own dedicated staff of sales reps, but print reps also have the ability to offer placement in both the print and online editions.

Shively said Sacbee.com has the capability to deliver specific ads that match a user’s registration data, lifestyle segments and site behavior.

That’s key, she said, because companies are increasingly asking that their ad messages be targeted to the right potential customer.

“That trend matches up nicely with industry reports suggesting that users prefer to receive messages that are relevant, and are more likely to act on messages when targeting is applied,” she said.