The old new HesperiaStar.com

As you might remember (those handful of you who care), last year, the Hesperia Star staff took over management of the content of the site at the same time as we added categories to make it easier for readers to find stories and allowed comments on each story.

Part of the goal was to make for a better experience for users — it was closer to the site I’d make, if I were making a site from scratch — but part of it was also to get our Web hits up, which after working at CBR, the 800-pound gorilla of the comic book industry on the Web, frankly sort of bothered me.

Well, it worked. While I don’t think I’m allowed to release exact figures, I just saw the site’s daily pageviews prior to switching over to the new system. Page hits had doubled by adding interactivity and usability to the site. So it wasn’t just what I wanted, it turns out that the readers responded to it as well. Hopefully the new site, which offers even more interactivity and usability, will have a similar response.

Speaking of the new site, it’s been patched to the next version of the program that runs everything, but the pages haven’t all been tweaked to take advantage of all the new bells and whistles. The current schedule is for the Star, the Daily Press and HighDesert.com to be fully belled and whistled by May 3.

As Marketplace pointed out yesterday, print isn’t dead, and reinvention is the name of the game. The Daily Press papers are currently kicking around some redesign ideas, from the papers’ logos through how they deliver news. Look for more on this later this year.

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