Editor’s note: This article was initially published in The Daily Gazette, Swarthmore’s online, daily newspaper founded in Fall 1996. As of Fall 2018, the DG has merged with The Phoenix. See the about page to read more about the DG.
Today, The Daily Gazette rolls out a new look for its website. There’s no occasion for it, other than that it’s been a long time coming. Adopted in the spring of 2016 and introduced by Sam Shih ’19 and yours truly, the old version of the site marked our shift off the servers of the Swarthmore College Computer Society, a change made for reasons of WordPress vulnerability. The old site’s cold-blue trim and flagrantly bold header image served its function, which most of the time was to be an eyesore, and we are all happy to be moving on.
The site you see before you today is not drastically new. In fact, it might not look new at all if you haven’t cleared your browser’s cache. Please do so, or otherwise ignore my remarks. Adapted from the same WordPress theme as before, the main differences are in font and color. The heading font, Canterbury, harks back to the traditional newspaper and serves as a playful reminder of the printed model out of which online papers evolved. The color, garnet, I hope need not be explained.
Other changes were introduced at the start of the semester, notably a remodeling of the front page to more neatly categorize articles. While the endless-pages-of-posts look provided a nice sense of linearity, it was hopelessly dated.
Astute observers of The Gazette’s brand will note the different Adirondack chair. I’ll say nothing other than that this one actually has legs.
Lastly, this site isn’t finished. We plan to push up new additions and keep working to make it easy to use and legible. This new Adirondack chair may be replaced by an even more representative one, and you may notice additional updates here and there, courtesy of our new Webmaster Navdeep Maini ’19. Stay tuned, too, for an update of our daily email digest.
As always, please let us know if you have feedback or input, for the website or any other part of our publication. You can reach me at kkakkar1 [at] swarthmore [dot] edu, and the broader editorial board at editors [at] daily [dot] swarthmore [dot] edu.
Yours in 232,
Keton
Post Script: You can view the evolution of The Daily Gazette website, here.
Can you bring back the listing of recent comments that used to be on the front page? I think that helped encourage discussions about articles.
Hi Steve,
Thanks for the suggestion. We thought the recent comments feed detracted from being able to see a good chunk of articles on the home page.
We will look for a good way to incorporate them! Thank you for the feedback.
Keton
This website redesign is better and looks fabulous. It is easy to navigate and looks pleasant to eyes. Great work!