First Posted: 7/29/2012
Most people don’t care what kind of engine they have under the hood. They just want the vehicle to go when they hit the gas pedal.
With any luck, our vehicle for delivering news to you will keep going Monday afternoon, as The Lima News completely replaces the engine that runs its website, LimaOhio.com.
The change is necessary as part of the sale of The Lima News by Freedom Communications to Ohio Community Media. Freedom hosted our website for the last half-dozen years and developed a number of the tools we use every day on our website.
We’ll take a step forward with a different host, Town News. This change could take the website down for as long as an hour on Monday afternoon, starting at 3 p.m.
Perhaps I should say it’s a step sideways: It’s my goal to make the new website operate as similarly to our existing website as possible.
We just redesigned the current website last year, based on months of research of readers’ habits and listening to your comments. In general, we’ve heard a lot of positive feedback about the organization of the home page.
I’ve spent a fair amount of time in the last week looking over the prototype of the site and making adjustments to make it look as much like the existing website as we could. Things may look and feel a little bit different, but essentially they should be in the same places and do the same things.
The best news of all is if I’ve missed something, you can let us know, and we can do something about it. Any change to how our old website looked took two or three days before our readers could enjoy it, and that was just for the simpler changes. Any change to the new website should take 10 or 15 minutes.
We’re able to make the changes ourselves, from right here in Lima. That’s fantastic news, as we’ll be able to develop new specialty website pages on the topics that matter here. I’ll get into that in a future column once we have a few to show off.
If you see something that doesn’t look right online, particularly on Monday afternoon, I invite you to email me at [email protected] or tweet me @Lima_Trinko. I’ll get to it as quickly as possible.
Some things won’t change.
We remain committed to people using their real names to comment on stories.
We’ll continue to post the most up-to-date information we have, telling you who told us the information.
We’ll continue to offer premium services for our paying subscribers, while allowing the casual reader to see what they’re missing by answering a survey provided by our partners.
We’ll continue to work toward being the 21st century news provider that West Central Ohio needs and deserves.
We know the new engine will need some tuning after we switch over, so we beg your forgiveness as we make adjustments to make it run as well as possible and we hit any rough patches.
