Project Santa Fe hits the Web

My pals at the Santa Fe New Mexican just launched their redesigned Web site -- a Small Initiatives project intended to give the newspaper/site team more tools and flexibility, and the site visitors a tidier, easier experience.

Besides the design changes, the site also now serves from a new content management system. Normally such a systems conversion alone would tax the patience of the best interactive teams. And though inevitable clean-up work remains, the transformation appears nearly complete and quite smooth. Michael Odza, Ginny Sohn and the entire New Mexican team deserve much credit and many thanks for their hard work and commitment to this project.

We set out to:

• Make the site easier to navigate
• Make content easier to find, see and read
• Encourage interaction wherever possible
• Emphasize content-related visuals
• Standardize and clarify the display ad inventory model
• Pick up on design cues from the newspaper, including its unique nameplate
• Pick up on design cues from the Santa Fe region, known for its scenery, native cultures and artisan influences
• Make the site less top-heavy and less dependent on drill-down navigation from the home page
• Ensure lean, semantically sound and valid markup and styling "under the hood" as much as systems would allow
• Optimize for internal and external search engines

Did we accomplish all those goals perfectly? Nah, but I believe we scored big improvements on each one. You be the judge.