Things Have Changed

By Joan Connell

April 24, 2008

Please be patient as we fine-tune our new design. Once the website is fully functional, we will welcome your comments and suggestions.

If you haven't yet noticed, the online edition of The Nation just got a whole new look: a bright, airy design, improved navigation, many more photos and multi-media features. Even our colors have changed. That fierce red, white and black palette is softer now, infused with humanizing shades of blue.

  • A Whole New Relationship

    Joan Connell: This is more than just a new homepage. Our new site offers new ways to mine the richness of America's oldest weekly journal of politics and culture.

  • Things Have Changed

    Joan Connell: Notice anything different about this page? The online edition of The Nation just got a makeover. Here's a guide to what's new.

  • Best of The Nation 2007

    Journalists & Journalism

    Joan Connell: It was a year of alarming news and amazing reporting on the Iraq War, the rise of private mercenary firms, the burgeoning business of disaster capitalism, an ever more vulnerable environment. Here's how The Nation covered the year.

The new homepage is significantly wider, allowing us to surface far more editorial content. New navigation on article-level pages allow you to discover our rich daily mix of breaking news and analysis, essays and reviews of books and cinema, blogs, videos and communities. Our publishing system categorizes each story by author and subject, which allows you to dig deep into the online archive for related material and peruse our directory of contributors.

Gone from the homepage are the numerous little boxes into which we stuffed our daily offerings. Instead, you can now browse the most compelling offerings of the day via tabs at the top of the homepage: Today in The Nation, This Week in Print, Campaign 08, StudentNation and more.

We're excited about these changes because they offer new ways to surface the good work we do every day. But we're also aware that when changes occur to a site you've become accustomed to, adjustments must be made. So here's a look at what's changed.

IMPROVED NAVIGATION

Quick links at the top and bottom of the homepage and on each article page speed you to popular features: Blogs, Books & The Arts, VideoNation, Podcasts, Calendar and our Digital Archive (available to subscribers) all the way back to 1865!).

TABBED BROWSING

This is the single most visible change on the homepage, enabling you to sample the best of the site: Today in The Nation--the freshest content on the site; This Week in Print, which contains the entire magazine; Campaign 08 and StudentNation, among others. You can customize your favorite tab view for future visits by clicking "Always Open This Tab."

TODAY'S TAGS

The content of the new Nation website is easy to explore and organize because each article is tagged by subject. (Tags appear in blue next to each headline.) These tags allow you to navigate our sophisticated content-management system, find related subjects in the digital archive and discover other articles of interest by your favorite authors.

The Today's Tags feature on the homepage also tells you which subjects are generating the most reader interest on any given day.

CURRENTLY

This is where you'll find the latest news and most compelling coverage of politics, world affairs, media and culture, drawn from the magazine and from web exclusives. A time stamp in red next to each headline alerts you to what's been posted within the past hour.

MEDIA

This is where the fun stuff lives: videos, podcasts, comics, Citizen Kang--the serialized political novella by Gary Phillips--and more. Scroll through the horizontal Media Band to see our original videos and favorites from around the web; download RadioNation podcast reports from Laura Flanders in weekly interviews with newsmakers and Nation contributors.

BOOKS & THE ARTS

Our award-winning writers on books, film, arts and culture are now front and center on the homepage. Look for compelling features from the magazine, plus an array of web exclusives and world-class poetry.

POPULAR TOPICS/MOST SEARCHED/MOST EMAILED

Our readers do the ranking on these expandable lists, found on the home page and on each article page.

BLOGS

Still the same great mix of commentary and analysis by Katrina vanden Heuvel, John Nichols, Ari Berman, Ari Melber, Katha Pollitt and a host of others, with a bright new design.

CALENDAR

Around the Nation, a national calendar of events of interest to progressives, is created by our readers and searchable by date and city.

DIG DEEP

At the top of each article page, adjust the text to a size that's right for you. In the blue box in the right margin, toggle between links to related material and other stories written by this author. In the author bio at the bottom of the page, the "more" button takes you to an alphabetized directory of Nation contributors--thousands of them. Subscribers to The Nation can dig even deeper, via a Digital Archive that goes all the way back to 1865.

WHAT HASN'T CHANGED

The Nation Poll, Newsfeed, regular columns from magazine contributors and the toughest crossword puzzle in the business--all on the homepage.

About Joan Connell

Joan Connell is The Nation's Web Editor. more...
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