Northwest Arkansas Newspapers debuts website redesign

The news website www.nwaonline.com, which features content from the publications of Northwest Arkansas Newspapers, debuted a redesign last week, with additional multimedia displays and photo galleries, a Yahoo-based search function and article-sharing tools.

The new design is aimed at making the site easier to use.

The site features content from the Northwest edition of the Arkansas Democrat-Gazette as well as the Northwest ArkansasTimes in Fayetteville, Benton County Daily Record in Bentonville, Springdale Morning News and Rogers Morning News.

Northwest Arkansas Newspapers is a joint venture equally owned by Arkansas Democrat Gazette and Stephens Media. It was formed in September 2009.

Nwaonline.com launched in December 2009.

With the redesign, sharelinks have been added to section pages for readers to share content including articles, videos, photos and poll results. Added to themost-popular-stories box are tabs that include articles most commented on, stories most e-mailed to others and most-watched videos.

“It makes it easier for online readers to find the information they want,” said Rusty Turner, editor and publisher of Northwest Arkansas Newspapers’ local daily papers. “We knew all along we’d need to update the look and update the features. They’ve been hard at work on it now for several months.”

Jon Schleuss, online editor, said the former Website was designed in just more than a month following the joint venture announcement, a task that required blending the news content of five daily newspapers.

“My favorite thing about the new design is that it cleans the site up so much,” he said.

Instead of just a list of articles, he said, the new format will highlight a headline of the day, a video of the day and more multimedia content, he said.

Matthew Costa, Northwest Arkansas Newspapers’ online and information technology director, said the new format also makes it easier for readers to quickly find news from their city or community.

“We’ve done a really good job with bringing all that content across northwest Arkansas together and presenting it in a way that’s more accessible,” he said. “It’s a lot easier to break out and see just the content you want to see.”

A new function allows online readers to increase paragraph size, which differs from most Web browsers that have functions to increase page size, Schleuss said.

The Web site also includes the content of eight weekly publications: The Weekly Vista in Bella Vista; Westside Eagle Observer in Benton County; The Free Weekly in Fayetteville; McDonald County Press in McDonald County, Mo.; La Prensa Libre in northwest Arkansas and southwest Missouri; The Herald Leader in Siloam Springs;

The Times of Northeast Benton County in Pea Ridge; and the Washington County Enterprise-Leader in western Washington County.

Community, Pages 5 on 05/11/2011