'Bakersfield Californian' Rolls Out Web Redesign, Sans AP

By: Miki Johnson The Bakersfield Californian rolled out a redesign of its Web site today, which features a less-cluttered homepage, new navigation top tabs, and a showcase of multimedia items.

Vice President of Interactive Media Howard Owens said his main goal for the redesign was to "introduce a site that had a high degree of usability" and that was easy to navigate. The print paper also unveiled a redesign today, which Owens said was a coincidence.

Besides moving the site's main navigation from an exhaustive left-hand bar to the top of the page, Bakersfield.com now also features improved search capabilities through Planet Discover and an expanded events calendar.

The 10-year-old site gets about 10,000 unique visitors per day. Bakersfield.com's Bakotopia section was recently named the Most Innovative Visitor Participation for its circulation category in the 2006 Digital Edge Awards by the Newspaper Association of America's New Media Federation. The judge's notes called Bakotopia, which includes classifieds and community postings, "a collaborative lifestyle site with a user interface that celebrates every offering."

Owens is also interested in seeing more video on the site, spurred by the recent purchase of several Sony Cybershot cameras, which he says are an inexpensive way to collect relatively high-quality video. "Reporters enjoy getting a little video in their story," he said, about a largely positive newsroom reaction to increased attention given to the Web site.

The site usually includes about one video per day, plus their regular podcasts, both of which will now appear in a prominent "Multimedia" box on the redesigned homepage.

Bakersfield.com also will continue to expand its roster of blogs and community journalism. The new Current Affairs blog, begun Feb. 9, is designed to direct readers to particularly insightful or interesting coverage of national issues, partially to fill a hole left when the site stopped running Associated Press content in November. Owens experimented with dropping the AP stories in order to focus on local coverage. After receiving only one complaint about the change, the Web site dropped their contract with the AP, effective today (the print edition still runs AP stories).

Although the Current Affairs blog has started out slow, with only three entries in its three weeks, Owens expects it to pick up as a portal to outstanding big-issue coverage "from The New York Times to a paper in India" rather than the "generic content" provided by AP. The blog, like several others on the site, will be run by Steve Swenson, who Owens expects to contribute much more frequently once things have calmed down after the redesign.

The idea of Bakersfield.com as a "portal" is also one that applies to the new Web design more generally.

"People come here with certain expectations that we are more than just the newspaper site," Owens explained. In the redesign, "Today's Paper" is only one of several main sections on the homepage, where users are also provided "continuous coverage" and access to other useful sites.