VTD: New look, same great taste

The original design composition for VTDigger. Drawn by Josh Larkin in early 2009.

Welcome to the new VTDigger.org! Back in early 2009 Anne approached me with the idea of creating a website that would publish in-depth, investigative news reports not found in the news landscape at the time. She asked if I’d be willing to design and build her site. I was interested but also pretty busy with other projects at the time. Not sure how far Galloway was going to follow her cockamamie idea, I dashed off an initial design composition (shown at right), and assumed that would be the end of it. To my surprise, she loved it, though she asked for a few small tweaks and a bit more color. And with that, the VTDigger.org many of you are familiar with was born and launched in the fall of 2009.

Fast forward to the present day. A year and a half later, thanks to you dear reader, VTD outgrew its design and its structure. And so here we are, with a new look, lots of new functionality, and all of the top-quality news you’ve come to depend on from VTD. Okay, enough small talk, time for the details.

Find it…quicker

To start, the entire site is now powered by a new caching engine. Say what, web geek? Well, basically, we’re doing some things in the backend to speed up page load times. Our new caching system loads pages faster, and the more you surf, the quicker it becomes, so read on!

We’ve renamed our categories to be closer inline with sections found in mainstream news outlets. Some of the sections are VTD specific, but we hope this will make finding articles by topic easier. We’ve also moved the section navigation just beneath the header and created drop down menus as you hover over section names in order to make reading by topic easier. Still can’t find what you’re looking for?

Enter our new search engine, designed to help you news hounds find that crucial story. We know, search on the old VTD was, well, sorely lacking to say the least. Our new engine queries the database searching article text, excerpts, comments, metadata and basically anything we’ve included in a story. And you’re not limited to a simple term or phrase search. The following searching functionality is supported:

Wildcards are supported through the use of a *:

state*

This will find all words that start with state.

Words can be marked as required or not required using + and -:

+statehouse – the word ‘statehouse’ must exist

-statehouse – the word ‘statehouse’ must not exist

An exact phrase can be included by wrapping the phrase in quotes:

‘exact search phrase’

Logical inclusion also works:

statehouse AND Shap = +statehouse +Shap

Here both statehouse and Shap must exist.

So have fun and dig deeper.

Now that’s a front page

VTD's frontpage comments display.

Our new front page offers some changes, as you might expect. Our slider, which always features our most recent stories, now holds eight articles and contains a numbered navigation. Click a number, the slider will move to the preview. Hover over the image or teaser and the slider won’t move.

Just below the slider we’re now offering a featured video. We’ll swap this video out on a regular basis as we have new footage for you to check out.

Commenting, as many of you know, is a huge part of VTD. The discourse around our articles is engaging, intelligent and it moves pretty quickly. To support this growing community, we’ve moved our weighing in area to the center of the page and included a tabbed navigation, allowing you to toggle between the most recent comments, and the most commented stories.

News aggregration has also been built into the site. Our ‘In the Aggregate’ section, located in the right-hand column, is a constantly changing news feed pulling articles from various news sources from around the region. Note that clicking any of these links will take you away from VTD to the original publisher, be it the Burlington Free Press, The Boston Globe, or another source. In the future we’ll be pulling stories from more sources, but for now, it’s a start.

Press releases, a perennial favorite for many of you, got a revamp as well. The rotating system of old has been tossed, replaced by a straight-forward listing of the 10 most recently published releases. As always, we don’t edit releases and publish them as we can, so you’re getting the word straight from the horse’s mouth.

Articles to be considered

Our new article templates have been designed to offer better functionality and better navigation to our recent work. Just below the bylines we’ve include a few buttons for sharing on Facebook, Twitter and via email. Wondering how you can support VTD? Use those buttons! The more readers we get, the stronger VTD will become.

Images in stories are now expandable on click. When we have full-sized from photographers, we like to show them off in all their glory. In the future we hope to offer direct purchase of photos from the site, but for now, if you see something you like and would like to inquire about purchasing or print or reusing our images, drop us a line at contact@vtdigger.org.

At the end of articles we’re now offering direct links to our three most recent articles. No need to trudge back to the front page to get to that next piece!

This of course isn’t an exhaustive list of all of the changes we’ve made, and we still have a few more ideas we’ll be rolling out in the weeks ahead. So surf around, read a bit, and as always, happy digging.

~Josh