An update on the STLtoday redesign
We’re a day into the redesign of STLtoday and we’ve made a lot of progress in addressing many issues that arose — some issues we’ve noticed ourselves, and many you’ve brought to our attention. For example, within 30 minutes of launching the new design, some of you let us know that some key links in the classified advertising section were broken. I think we got those fixed about 31 minutes after launching the redesign.
First, here’s a link to our video tutorial about the redesign. And at the bottom of this posting, you’ll see a link to our “frequently asked questions” about the redesign.
Some have asked whether we tested the site before we launched it.
Well, of course we did.
I think many people familiar with this process will agree that sometimes, you don’t really know where the problems are until you get the site out of the garage or the test track and onto the highway, in a true production environment. I won’t suggest that’s the cause of the all the problems, but it accounted for some. Here’s a few updates on our progress — along with our thank you for coming along for the ride and for those of you who offered constructive feedback.
Pop-up ads. We know some of you have had an issue with numerous pop-up ads. We’re working on that and we think (stress, think) we have figured out the problem. Please let us know if you still see it. The more detail you can provide, the better (i.e. what browser and operating system).
Can’t find the older columns. Boy, howdy, we know this was a problem. You could read current columns, but not previous ones. We’ve made progress on that, but it’s high on our list to address.
Formatting problems. You probably have noticed some pages that weren’t formatted in our new design correctly. Prep Sports, Weather, some of our guide listing pages (i.e. restaurants, bars) and others. We’re getting to them as quickly as possible.
Site map the Today’s Post-Dispatch. Oops. We thought we had’em ready — but obviously, we didn’t. The site map is up. So is Today’s Post-Dispatch — but there’s still some tweaking to do. Thank you for your patience.
Blog text formatting. We’ve made changes there to fix the lack of text formatting — bold, italic, bulleted type and set-off quotes. All fixed.
Broken links in the dropdown. Made a lot of progress stamping out bugs there, but let us know if you still see things. Some of you have made great suggestions for items that should be in the dropdown that we overlooked, so we’re adding and tweaking as needed.
Dropdown menu under ads. Ugh, yes, we know. Working on that, too, and as we ID the ads that are causing the problems, we’re taking care of it. If you have specifics on that issue, again, we’re all ears.
Forums – we increased the number of threads! We heard about this for a long time, so we’ve bumped the number of threads per page from eight to 12.
Multimedia channel. A work in progress. Thank you for your patience.
Got more questions? Don’t forget to consult the FAQ we posted here. You can also send e-mail to sitehelp@stltoday.com.
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Kurt is the director of social media for the Post-Dispatch, where he has worked since August 2002. He's been a journalist since 1982, covering municipal government, courts, education and two hurricanes as a reporter before becoming an editor. 
Michael, thank you for your comments about the drop-down navigation. We know that it’s a little too quick on the draw and we need to tweak that, so it doesn’t pop up just by mousing over it. I also appreciate your articulating what we hope is a good feature of that, the ability to get anywhere on the site pretty quickly.
I’m grateful for the comments here. The more specific you can be about features that don’t work or things that seem confusing, the easier it is to try and address them. General comments such as “I hate the site” don’t really help us improve it. Some things are in the eye of the beholder (i.e. whether you like the colors).
And as for consensus? Well, I’ll grant you that the consensus of the several dozen people who have commented here is against the redesign.
Again, thank you all for being STLtoday readers, for taking the time to look over the site and for offering feedback.