Welcome to Webmaking

This blog is meant as an informal forum for communication with our valued readers. We will publish posts occasionally, when we have something new to share with you, and we will read all of your comments and suggestions for making the Toronto Star's website better for consideration in our 2006 redesign.

thestar.com is a huge website with thousands of web pages. Most days we publish hundreds of stories, several contests, photo galleries, polls, Speak Out discussions, circulation offers, archives and special sections and respond to hundreds of queries to our Webmaster email. The newspaper business has often been described as the daily miracle - thestar.com has to reflect that miracle and must in its own way be a miracle as well. There is nothing simple about the technology behind thestar.com. The daily demands on the site are huge and we do our best to make sure that it is accessible to as many of our readers as possible, 100 per cent of the time. We commit to continued improvement and adding new features to our site as quickly and often as possible.

A final thought: This webmaking blog is meant to be a constructive forum for communicating ideas, bugs, new technologies and enhancements that will make thestar.com the best website for local, national, international news and breaking news. If you have comments about the editorial content of the Toronto Star please feel free to contact the appropriate department which can be found on our Contact Us page.

Comments

[Stephen]

It would be useful to move the "TODAY'S PAPER" link back into the first screen (1024x768 rez), and maybe even to make it a little more prominent.

Thanks.

[Jim]

One of the requirements of running my business is the necessity to read articles from between fifty or sixty online versions of newspapers per day. I never know which ones they'll be on any given day, it depends on what paper the email "alert" directs me to.

So over the last year or so, I've had to register with several hundred newspapers, as most have this policy, but for me it was a necessary evil. (Some of the registration processes are so complex and time consuming, it's like applying for citizenship.)

At any rate, I think The Star has made a good decision by dropping the registration requirement. More importantly, I can also tell you that you have one of the best online layouts that I've seen anywhere, and as you now know, I've seen a few. It's easy to find things, it's logical in navigation, etc. etc. I wish they were all like The Star, it would make my job easier. Keep up the fine work.

[Adam]

One really, really simple suggestion: I have a big monitor at a high resolution, but the website is hard coded to use just a small part of my screen real estate. Widen the text areas so that I can use my whole viewing space and it'll just wrap for people with smaller screens. I hate always having to click on "Print Story" to see more than a tiny bit at a time (which I always do).

[Steven Javor]

It will be interesting to see how a newspaper makes design (and editorial?) decisions in running their online portal.

[Tim G.]

I've always like thestar.com.

No registration is a good idea (check bugmenot.com to see how many people agree).

The new design works well for me. This blog is a good idea too.

Keep innovating!

[Steve St-Laurent]

There were a few nice touches to the recent overhaul, but I was disappointed to see thestar.com abandon serif fonts for its main story display. The Web is numbingly Helvetica, Arial and Verdana. A few news sites, such as thestar.com were different.

There are at least a couple of serif fonts – Times New Roman and Georgia – that display beautifully on the Web, and I would commend them to you.

As someone once said about Helvetica, Verdana [even though optimized for the Web] is best suited for bus schedules, hospital signs and the population of Switzerland. Though highly effective in many situations, it's cold, clinical and actually detracts from the legibility of stories. Serifs are not mere ornamentation; they serve a purpose.

Also, your old front page offered more-detailed teasers to more stories. I feel they drew me deeper into the site than the brief, cryptic heads now do.

[Sue Watson]

I love reading the news at the Toronto Star and it is the first place I go to when there is a breaking story. (As a news junkie and film fan, the Star is my first choice for on-line news).
I don't like the new page layout as much (it was changed recently) mainly because I miss the summary paragraphs that accompanied your story links. If I only see a headline (link) I might skip over the story.

[MarkusRTK]

Wow, how very newspaper - going all "open-source" with your removing registration (way to buck the trend, guys! TimesSelect has no future!) and your adding a blog so you can get feedback and create a forum, then you turn around and put all comments through a MODERATOR! a moderator! the most incredibly old-school way to stifle debate! what an incredible anachronism! i doff my hat to you, toronto star.

[anna Kay]

The mechanics of making the online model work are one thing. More importantly, will The Star reverse course and actually be a voice for unbiased news?
In the last little while the paper has become decidedly more right wing in a world already dominated by American or American-oriented media.

[Mike]

Hey There!

Long time star newspaper and star.com reader. I think the new layout is OK, although I was fairly used to the old one. One thing I would definately work on is dynamic scaling, so that the users full screen is used, and not constricted to a pre set dimension. It's not hard to integrate and works with all systems.

Some video clips couldn't hurt.. That'd be pretty innovative for a newspaper company to get into video because of the web.. Very cool and its the future!

[James Sedgwick]

Why isn't linked to from every page, or at least the main page?

Almost like you don't want to hear from us, or don't want others to know what we think of you

[Frandroid]

How about RSS-ing each columnist individually?

[John Chuckman]

Improve Voices or get rid of it. You do not offer the opportunity to comment on most hard news of the day. This looks suspiciously like censorship.

You have absolutely silly stuff on indefinitely, such as Acts of Kindness. The biggest act of kindness the Star could do is drop Voices if you can't improve it.

[E H Hausmann]

For several days I've been receiving The Star's daily download newspaper, which I requested out of curiousity because I couldn't figure the purpose of it all. Today I cancelled it, being none the wiser:

So then, what really is the purpose of a daily e-mail 8-page little newspaper? If it contained nothing but breaking news stories and similar items of great urgency, there might be a point to it. But then again, for breaking news I could look up the main Star website anyway.

I think you blew this one.