If you’re a regular, or even occasional, visitor to alderleyedge.com, you’ve probably noticed that everything looks a bit different. After several months of development, we are delighted to announce the launch of our new responsive web site.
What this means, in the simplest of terms, is that our web site will now automatically adapt to the screen size of the device you are using - providing a better user experience whether you are visiting via a smartphone, tablet, laptop or desktop computer.
Use of smartphones and tablets continues to show tremendous growth. Looking at our statistics, almost 40% of visits to our web site now take place on handheld devices. With this trend in mind we concluded that the best thing to do for our readers was to develop a responsive web site.
With one unified responsive web site all our readers, irrespective of device, will have convenient access to all of the same rich content and functionality available on the desktop alderleyedge.com site. Mobile users will for the first time have convenient access to all articles, past and present, features such as full photo galleries and have the ability to comment.
Beyond making our content more accessible we have also spent a great deal of time and effort ensuring our content is presented in a way that makes everything easier to find and enjoy. Here are just a few of the enhancements we have introduced:
- It is now easier to find the major stories with our editor's pick and most popular articles highlighted on the home page
- The most discussed section on the home page allows you to quickly find articles our readers are commenting on.
- Photo galleries have been given a complete overhaul allowing you to view photos full screen and swipe through them on touch devices.
- Improved reading experience with bigger and better typography.
- Curated tweets on our home page will allow us to quickly bring you time sensitive information and breaking news as it happens.
- Higher impact larger images used throughout the web site and high DPI retina quality images on phones.
- Improved weather, with hour by hour forecasts for the next 24 hours.
- At the foot of each article you have quick and easy access to the latest news, the most discussed articles, and any articles related to the one your are viewing.
We originally introduced a comprehensive business directory to enable our readers to share their views on local businesses but unfortunately it was frequently abused by some local businesses rendering many of the reviews of no value to our readers. Without the reviews, our directory would contain no original content and given it was very time consuming to manage we decided it was no longer feasible to maintain.
In whatever we do we strive to be the best and with Google Places and Yelp just a click away it was clear that we cannot compete. Therefore we concluded we are better off focussing our limited resources on our strengths and the areas which we know are of most interest to our readers - which is primarily our timely and comprehensive coverage of local news.
The re-design also supports our evolving commercial strategy as we continue to progress towards making alderleyedge.com sustainable long term. I am pleased to say that marketing budgets appear to be finally following the audience online, albeit slowly.
We would like to take this opportunity to thank all our advertisers past and present. A special thank you Destinology, Harper and Quinn, Henry D Johnstone, Kimble Roden Architects, Renew Clinic, Royles Jaguar and Terra Nova School who have all recently committed to long term advertising deals with alderleyedge.com and wilmslow.co.uk. Without the support of our advertisers it would not be possible for us to provide the service we do to the local community.
We're continuing to work on the design, functionality and user interface, and we are committed to learning from how our readers use the site - so it can evolve to best serve all our readers and our advertisers.
We'd really like your feedback. Please let us know what you think about the new site by adding a comment below. We very much hope you enjoy using it, however should you have any questions about the new design or experience any technical difficulties then please email [email protected].
