Hopefully change helps you find the stories you want to read on yakimaherald.com.

If you haven’t noticed already, yakimaherald.com has been going through a few changes recently. The two most recent changes have been how you find stories and the user interface (logo, colors, placement of content).

There have been other projects the Web guys have been taking on over the last two months to improve yakimaherald.com, however, for the time being, I am going to write about the two latest changes.

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Navigation System

Yakimaherald.com no longer has a navigation bar on the top and left side of the Web site. (see examples marked in red)

We have moved many of the links into one place in the top navigation bar for a number of reasons; the first to help readers find what they are looking for on yakimaherald.com. The new navigation bar contains most of the old links to pages readers have come to expect, such as the sports page, or today’s news page.

- More pages, more stories -
On closer inspection of the navigation bar, readers will find new links, new pages, and a way to read stories that were published that week in the Yakima Herald newspaper. Readers will find a new link, ‘This Week,’ in a couple sections that provide stories published within yakimaherald.com up to seven days ago. Anything older can be found in the section titled ‘Archives.’

- Better organization -
The new navigation bar was created to make things easier to find. Part of that mission included making the navigation consistent accross the Web site. For instance, if you are in the obituaries section and want to go to the Valley Life page, you should be able to find it - a click away. That said, many readers were happy with the old navigation system and may not be able to find what they are looking for with the new navigation bar. Since this is a new system, we expect readers to have questions, so please post them below.

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More to come
Currently we are testing the new navigation system. Please let us know if it does not function in the comments section of this post: (Fixing Bugs)

I will post more about the changes and additional pages in the coming week!

-TJ