So here it is: our shiny new toy. A team of specialized craftsmen has labored in our workshop for months to meticulously sculpt this limited-edition, certified-authentic D Magazine website, and they’ve done it all because of you.
Since the last new iteration of our online experience launched more than four years ago, grand new opportunities for enhancing stories and photography online have been developed. It was time we repositioned ourselves to take advantage of those.
But even more significantly, you’ve changed a lot in the last four years. We’re not referring to any weight you may have gained or lost during that time. (By the way, you look great!) We mean your habits as a consumer of online media, and of DMagazine.com specifically.
Smartphones and tablet computers have transformed the way in which our readers interact with our content. Visits via mobile devices now account for fully 30 percent of all traffic to our site, and we expect that share to continue to increase. That’s been a problem because too much of our website has been difficult to engage with on small screens.A website isn’t supposed to be a one-way conversation.
If it weren’t for the “responsive design” with which we’ve created the new DMagazine.com, you wouldn’t be able to read this article on your phone without employing a series of headache-inducing pinches, taps, and squints. You’ll find that every page of our site has now been customized for an optimal reading experience, regardless of which device you’re using.
That’s the lead story, the headliner of our relaunch, but longtime readers will undoubtedly note a host of smaller nips, tucks, and additions we’ve made. So we’d like to explain a little bit more about a few of those. We hope you like them as much as we do.
THE DAILY
Each day on DMagazine.com our writers and editors produce a host of content, including news about local govenment and politics, reviews of both the trendiest and most obscure restaurants, recommendations for what you should do tonight and this weekend, and the latest in interior design and fashion. Dallas is a lively place full of remarkable people and organizations, and we aim for the stories we tell to accurately reflect that.
It’s a lot to keep up with, even if you love this city as much as we do. Since (unlike us) most of you don’t get paid to do that, we want to make it much easier. And so we present to you The Daily, a single page through which you can follow the latest content from all of our news and lifestyle blogs in one place. As new posts are published, they will automatically feed onto The Daily so that you’ll never miss a thing.
We’ve also given you the power to filter The Daily to your own preferences. In the lefthand sidebar, you’ll find tools for narrowing the content to your tastes, either by category or by blog. Looking for older posts? Just scroll down the page and hit “Load More.”
The news never stops.
NEW LOOK AT GALLERIES
We’ve long prided ourselves on the quality of the artwork and photographs on display in the D Magazine family of publications. We’ve also long been disappointed by our own limitations in presenting those images online.
Our new galleries are a major improvement. Photos can now run much larger than before, and the far more immersive interface (use the arrows at right and left to navigate) allows readers to cycle through a collection of pictures much more easily. You’ll also find, in the top right corner of each image page, simple tools for sharing via social media.
We finally feel we’re doing justice to the work of our photographers.
EXPANDED COMMENTING
New media isn’t supposed to be a one-way conversation. We don’t just want you to read our stories, we want you to engage with them. We want you to share your thoughts on our articles, blog posts, and restaurant guides. We want you to interact with our readers through the comments sections.
While our blog posts have long encouraged comments, our magazine articles and directory listings have been closed off. With our relaunch, we’ve changed that.
Commenting is now available throughout the site. One reason it hasn’t been up until now was the need to develop a system through which our readers could sign in just once in order participate in the discussion across the different segments of our site, rather than being asked to sign in again and again when moving from one of our blogs to another.
That system is now up and running, and you can use any of the major social media networks as the simplest means of joining the conversation. Just click “Sign In” in the navigation bar at the top of any page, or at the bottom of any of the posts or articles on which you’d like to leave your comment. From there just pick your favored means of registering with our website, and then let us hear what you’ve got to say.Mobile devices account for 30 percent of all our traffic.
That might include, of course, any opinions or suggestions you have about the changes you’ve observed on our site. We’d very much like to hear those as well. As with any technological enterprise, we fully expect to encounter some bugs or glitches that we didn’t anticipate, and you can be helpful to us by pointing those out.
To paraphrase Oscar-winning filmmaker Woody Allen, a website is like a shark. It has to constantly move forward, or it dies. The last thing we want DMagazine.com to become is a dead shark.
We hope that you’ll be patient as we iron out any unforeseen difficulties and continue to make updates and improvements. This relaunch isn’t the end of the process for us, not by a long shot. In the coming weeks and months, we’ll roll out some other new tricks.
Can’t wait to share those with you.
