D e s e r t E x p o s u r e
December
2008
Homepage for the Holidays
A new look online, a New Year ahead.
It's true that there's no place like home, but even the nicest home can use redecorating every now and then. The same goes for home pages on the Web, so we recently gave the landing spot at DesertExposure.com what those home-improvement shows might call an "extreme makeover." Rather than turning the page over to the neighbors (while, in true home-improvement TV fashion, we remodel their home page), though, we turned to our own Web guru, David Cortner. He's been minding our site since we first started posting the content of every issue online, nearly four years ago.
When you click on the new home page at www.desertexposure.com, the first thing you'll notice is a bit of "eye candy": A montage of images from the current issue seems to fluoresce across the screen. We're told that this involves some sort of programming technology that anybody can master, given time or the brain of a 17-year-old, but it looks like magic to us.
The new design, however, isn't all about looks and dazzle — though we certainly think it's pretty dazzling. The idea, rather, is to put more of the online content resources of Desert Exposure only a click away.
Take our wildly popular "40 Days and 40 Nights" calendar, for example. Now, we know there are other local and regional events compilations online, but we modestly think ours is the best. That's no brag, just fact, as Walter Brennan used to say. (He used to say it, originally at least, on a short-lived TV show called "The Guns of Will Sonnett" — you can look it up. On the Internet, naturally. Now where were we?) Part of that superiority is sheer numbers: Last month, for instance, "40 Days and 40 Nights" included more than 260 events throughout Southwest New Mexico, for November and the first 10 days of December (hence, "40 Days, etc."). Readers of our print edition can appreciate that thoroughness simply by flipping through the pages near the end of our B section every month.
The other can't-beat-that quality of our events calendar can be appreciated only online: It's simply very cool. Webmaster Cortner, again, has worked some sort of technological voodoo and created a cute little calendar page showing the 40 days in question. Clicking on any date zooms you to what's happening then. Very slick.
Trouble is, until now we were kind of hiding that light under the proverbial bushel. You used to have to click from the home page to the current issue, then click on the "40 Days and 40 Nights" link to experience this computerized coolness.
No more. The new home page — besides offering a direct link to the events calendar — now boasts a smaller, even cuter mini-calendar in the upper left corner. Pick a date, any date, and you can zoom straight to what's happening.
That philosophy of making our online goodies easier to get at and more obvious applies to the whole redesign. Online newcomers to Desert Exposure might not be aware, for example, that we offer the best and most complete guide to restaurants from Las Cruces to Silver City, from Columbus to Reserve. Even when the print version of our "Red or Green?" listings gets abbreviated, the entire list is always available online. The Web version also includes links to reviews of restaurants we've featured in issues past.
Great stuff, but not immediately apparent on our old home page. So the new look sports a direct link to the dining guide, plus links that jump straight to each county's listings.
The same goes for our gallery guide, which (as you might expect if you've read this far) is the most complete listing of artistic stops in our area: The new homepage offers one-click access to the whole guide, or direct links to galleries by city.
Our guides to area attractions, Grant County weekly events and the latest arts news likewise get handy links on the homepage.
Naturally, there's also a complete table of contents to the current issue, plus links to any online "extras" we've posted (like additional visuals for Jerry Eagan's "Hiking Apacheria" series, which returns in this issue, plus an index to the whole series).
A prominently placed search box makes it easy to find articles in our back issues, which are online from January 2005 to the present. Or you can browse through back issues by clicking, not surprisingly, "Back Issues."
In the middle of the new design, right below that snazzy image montage, a new text area offers a window into the current issue's highlights and updates that we can deliver faster to folks online than in print. We're not promising that this section of the homepage will be updated daily or even every other day — hey, we need a day off now and then, too! But the technology (more voodoo, apparently) does allow a much more rapid and hassle-free refreshing of the homepage content.
In short, you might want to start checking our home page every now and then, even if you think you've seen everything for the month. We might start posting some surprises there.
The final improvement to our home page that you'll notice is the addition of online ads — not oodles of ads cluttering up your screen or popping up at you, like some sites, but a couple of attractively placed ads for the folks who, after all, make Desert Exposure possible each month. These homepage ads rotate randomly among all our online advertisers, who just happen to be all our display print advertisers.
Yes, that's a not-so-subtle reminder that — uniquely among area publications — advertising in Desert Exposure puts your message in front of our established print readership as well as our expanding online audience. Investing in a print ad automatically gets you online as well — for free. All together, the print and online versions of Desert Exposure reach more than 35,000 people every month.
In these challenging economic times, we think it's nice to still be able to find such a bargain for your advertising dollars.
Speaking of our advertisers, please join us this holiday season in thanking them for enabling us to bring you Desert Exposure, in print and online, at absolutely no cost to you, the readers. As always, we appreciate their investment in Desert Exposure and look forward to working with our advertisers, to help them meet their challenges in 2009.
And of course we want to add season's greetings to you, our readers and Web site users. Shouldering the burden of that holiday message on this month's cover is Pippin, the youngest member of our family. Regular readers will recall that Pippin was an "unplanned" addition to our household not quite three years ago (see Continental Divide, April 2006). So he was, you might say, sort of a gift himself — appropriate for holiday wishes.
As the New Year dawns and we try to remember to change "2008" to "2009" on every page of the next issue, we'd add a wish that the acrimony and harsh discourse that characterizes such presidential election years be washed away with the first glass of New Year's Eve champagne. However you voted and rooted, America has plenty of challenges ahead to keep all hands busy. You might try exchanging that clenched fist for an outstretched helping hand, and see if the New Year isn't better for it.
Happy holidays and a better New Year from all of us here at Desert Exposure (especially Pippin, who also hopes those packages contain some new cat toys) and thanks for the gift of your attention, whether to ink on paper or pixels on screen.
David A. Fryxell is editor and publisher of Desert Exposure.