Nice Site Like it a lot

Where's the weather?

Thanks Ken. John, you can find an overview of the local weather at the bottom of the news page. We're working on reintroducing the full weather pages to the news section as before.

Strange to find serif typeface used for main body text. I was always led to believe that a serif typeface was better when reading dense body text on paper whereas a sans serif typeface was better to read online (again regarding dense body text). Something to do with reading psychology? Apparently we read with different parts of our brain as to whether we're reading on-screen or hard copy. It is some while since I took my Graphics degree - has this thinking now changed with the growing technological change? Looks clean design though.

thumps up here, easy to read- Carterton, New Zealand

Love it! Much easier to navigate and like the bigger print. Thanks Shropshire Star.

What an improvement. Superb. Really clean and it looks great on the iPhone. Well done

Sorry, I prefer the old site, you can see more in one frame. You have to go looking on this site more.

Sorry but it looks awful to me. Very difficult font to read on a PC, especially the headlines. Looks like a 10 year old child designed it.

Question: Why don't you put the Shropshire Star Masthead that we are all familiar with at the top of the page?

Nice BUT the font is to spirally and "busy" it should be a cleaner plainer font like ARIAL to make it easier to read especially for OAPs

I think it's great, and I can finally post comments easily from my iPhone

The new format doesn't support pinch-zoom on my Android tablet. Used to work fine before. Now text is fixed at far too small in size and I cant do a think about it. Funny how improvements always mess up something that worked!

Whats happened to the local / area news links ?you are forcing people back to the main news areas :-( also someone could do with looking into your usage of H1 & H2 tags you should only have one H1 tag on a page and then H2 H3 etc. Poor start for such a good newspaper, you needed a change yes but beta test with your users like the BBC do first before putting live and upsetting users who will leave and not come back.

Thanks for the comments everyone. We're taking them all on board and considering the points that you've made.

Stuart, the local news links should be under the news index. If you click 'local news' you'll get a page with a taster from each local area and the ability to click through to see the full category. For example: http://www.shropshirestar.com/news/local-news/telford-local-news/

Please let me know if this isn't working correctly for you. I'll put your point about the tags over to our development team.

Please changed the font to any Sans-Serif - Its incredibly difficult to read!

Stuart, it looks like this new site is using HTML5 (header, article, footer etc.) which means it's fine to have multiple H1s as long as there's only one in each section.

From an ex-developer at MNA - the site looks great and a big improvement!

Sorry but it looks awful here, font is too large and unpleasant to read, looks like something aimed at pre-school infants.

Tom that's correct the new HTML5 outlining algorithm allows multiple s in a page, but over-usage can be seen as "Spamdexing" by search engines, the front page of the new site currently contains just H1 tags and no H2 etc this can cause issues and be seen as spamming which a site such as this can ill afford. Search engines rank "relevancy" in a number of ways. Heading tags are one of a number of things taken into consideration when search engines index a site. They assumes the contents of tags are more important than tags and so on. Multiple sections yes use more than H1 Tag if need be but a page full no, be careful on how you use them. May be worth you reviewing Matt Cutts Video on such practice. Having been a usability, web accessibility adviser for over 15 years I can tell you such things are critical to a websites performance.

Agree with AJ let's have the old site back please. I don't know what it is with modern web designers but they seem to be very convincing at selling the king new clothes when the old were perfectly good....every website "update" I have ever seen always seems to be worse for the user.

I'm loving the new site!

The font size is way too big - It's like reading a children's book. This comments section is spread across the whole width of my screen, making it an unpleasant reading experience. Sorry. thumbs down from me at this stage.

Please change the font and make it smaller too. It looks like a "large print" book for blind people.

Generally an improvement. Good job. Are you going to bring back the "Most Commented" list?

I never thought it would happen - but I actually agree with H. St. John Peasbody above, the comments are the whole width of my monitor, I also find the pages quite scattered, I prefer a list of headlines instead of things scattered around the screen. Its a shame as the old site worked well.

its lacking a shortcut quick link to the 'most commented' articles which is normally on the home page, this is a shame as its useful to find what everyones talking about and stimulate debate

am i missing it too but there is no "search" option on here to look through articles quickly and easily

Sorry but I'm not liking this new site at all. The previous site was fine in my opinion, this just looks like a child has designed it.

I will agree that on my iphone it looks better than before, but on my laptop it doesnt look good at all and generally I use my laptop more than my phone.

Sorry, have to agree with a few others... its looks awful on a large screen and the body copy font is too big and dense making difficult to read. Needs more breathing space between the lines and maybe a couple of pixels smaller?

Visually, the new layout is way to staggered causing your eyes to flit all over the place and the pages show no real hierarchy. Just looks like every thing has been thrown on to the screen/page without any real structure or thought on user experience.

As an experienced graphic & web designer myself this unfortunately is quite a poor attempt to re-design and update something that was not broken. Sorry.

Layout is much better but font is very bad. It may look better on an iPad or iPhone but it looks dreadful on a PC.

Stuart, I appreciate you have been a usability, web accessibility adviser for over 15 years and that you've built up a lot of knowledge during that time. But things change quickly, and unless you've spent the last couple of years of that in Google's PageRank team asking them specifically how they're going to handle html5, then you're just guessing the same as anyone else is. The fact that there doesn't seem to be any official guidance from Google that isn't over 3 years old - and that trying to research it seems to result in nothing but pages of arguments between SEO experts - suggests to me that it probably makes about as much difference as Meta tags (sod all). Might as well build the site how HTML5 intended, allowing 1 per section/article and wait for the web to catch up if need-be (html5 isn't even finalised yet).

Yep there's no h2 tags, but if you're building the page from from a semantic point of view would it make much sense to start a h2 tag in a section without having had a h1 when the other h1s on the page were defined in a completely different section/context? I guess that's up to the dev team to decide and I know they do consult SEO specialists, but I definitely think there are arguments to both sides!

Is it set on italic? its giving me a headache trying to read it. Try consulting some branding guidelines from leading organisations who create web-based communications for the partially sighted such as RNIB I cannot believe that this is best practice

where has the environmental news section gone?

Its actually very easy to use on my iPhone now. So well done.

Glad to see you using HTML5 as I use a PC with 24" screen, one with a 19" screen, a tablet and a phone to view the site.

Are you planning on enabling nested/embedded comments? That's the best part of the comments section. It would also be good to enable a small amount of markup inside comments using BBCode, e.g. [b]bold[/b] and [i]italic[/i].

a picture for each story is a good way to draw ones attention to it but actually it looks a bit busy in my opinion

the text is not easy to read either

i like the plain white background, its clean and simple

im not sure about the menu being on top like that, isnt it normal to have a list down the left hand side? this may confuse people who are trying to find their way around the site.

I dont see why its changing actually I like the older site mroe!!

"like"

:z)

I cannot look at Classified. When I select the tab all I get is a page with boxes where the image is not displaying and although it says use the search facility on the right there is no search box

Great on a pc but I can't expand font size on an iPad. Could you lokk into that pls.

@ Peasbody. You can reduce font size by pressing down shift, ctrl and - on a pc. Wish I had your good eyesight

@ Bnd. Your comment about blind people was both ignorant and extremely offensive

Why can't we reply to comments?

Much cleaner. I've tried it on desktop and iPhone and I'm impressed.

Hi Tyrone,

Most commented is definitely one of the things we want to bring - I could always tell how popular it was by the amount of new comments coming on articles that were often a week old!

We couldn't bring it on to the new site in the way it was before, but we're working on a new version.

Don't like it one bit! Difficult to find anything. Wheres the 'most commented' list?

To those asking about the styling of the comments - that is something that we are looking at today to reduce the width and make them easier to scan. The reply function is something that we're also looking to bring back very soon.

Linda, apologies about the classified section. That is also being worked on today with the hope that it will be up and running asap.

I'm afraid you have made this unusable for me! I used to look at the Shropshire Star on my iPad first thing and I can no longer read the text. Not only is it in a serif font, but I can't use the pinch/zoom facility. I can't find thr local need either. Have you got rid of that?

Looks awful on a PC monitor. Main page is scrappy and all over the place. Fonts don't anti alias so look spiky and hard to read. Difficult to navigate.

What happened to 'Search'?

How do I search the site for a news story without literally searching the site?

The default font is so enormous! I feel like I need to stand back from the screen, it's overwhelming!

My comment above rather proves my point. "local need" should of course read "local news" (autocorrect!) but I normally zoom out the text to proofread and I couldn't do that, hence the typo.

I'm looking at the site on a desktop PC. Overall it's an improvement - the old website was starting to look a bit 1996.

I agree with what others have said about the font - sans-serif would be a tad easier to read methinks. Featured images on news stories like the one above are wayyy too big and need cropping a bit, and I think you could do with a bit of padding around the body - 20px perhaps?

coming along nicely

i like that you have made all the comments compressed to half screen but it does require us to scroll down more now

I dont like the typeface though

Hi all, thanks again for the comments and please keep them coming.

As you'll hopefully notice, the comments section has been restyled today so that it no longer spans the width of the page. This should make it easier to read.

We've also made some of the local news areas more prominent and are working to further improve the navigation in this section.

Green guru - the environment section should now be back under news.

Good but i think you need a reply button on these comments in order to have more debate going on here

Can now expand on an iPad, as before. If this was a problem fixed at your end thanks Todd.

Is the search feature coming back soon for current and historic content? Without it my viewing time on the site has reduced significantly.

Hi razor - the reply button is definitely on the way back. It's in the developers queue of things to do.

Katherine - the developers seemed a bit puzzled by your comment as they haven't done anything, but we're glad it's working! We're looking at ways to give users control over how big/small the text is - but that might not be a short-term fix.

Herbie - I bumped the search feature to the top of the queue of 'things to do' yesterday, so you can expect to see it return soon. Apologies for the problems you've had.

The site is still awful....how do we find the letters page? How do we find the most commented stories? How do we reply? Even finding this article took ages.