Can you find what you need when you turn to us?

By DAN ROSS

Last March we tossed out much of what we’d been doing online and rolled out a brand new look. After nearly a year, it is time to ask ... are we doing it right?

NapaValleyRegister.com readers — going through as many as 2 million pages each month — are the ones who drive what we do, how we do it and influence what the Web site looks like. We looked at a huge amount of statistics on what people were reading when we designed this version of the Web site.

We are now at the point of looking at the 2008 numbers, the post-redesign numbers. My focus is not so much what we are doing right, rather taking a look at where we can improve. With that in mind, I have a question for you, the readers.

What can we do to make it easier for you to find the information you need and expect us to provide you?

I took the time to go through a year’s worth of stats on what term or phrase people typed when doing searches on our site. From that I found a few things we definitely need to make easier.

In the top five items people searched for were births and weddings.

Not exactly hard news, right? How many times a day does anyone go onto a news Web site and look for who was born or married that day?

These searches are one-time things, looking for a family member’s wedding announcement or a friend’s new-baby notice. These items are too hard to find, so we need to move these to a place people can get to in a much easier fashion that they have today.

The local fishing report also showed up very high in the most searched for items of 2008, so we need to make a tweak there too.

I have all these stats, but I am turning to you and asking ... what frustrates you on NapaValleyRegister.com (other than reading some of the more unusual comments at the end of some articles), what would you move to a different place so you could find it quicker, what would make you hang around and read more?

Maybe there is a feature you’d like to see more of, or a feature we don’t offer.

In the online opinion section, we started the Daily Random Thoughts item, giving readers a chance to sound off on any topic that is not a part of that day’s publication. From those comments, we often pull one or more out to give them their own space to generate a more thorough community dialogue.

We also just added a daily horoscope, a daily sudoku puzzle and a daily listing of the California state lottery numbers (so you can check your winning ticket and send a small token of appreciation to the person who helped you find out you are a winner!) as toys to enjoy while surfing the site.

Come on, take a look over the Web site and get back to me on what you’d like to see.

Dan Ross is NapaValleyRegister.com’s Online Editor and a member of the Register’s editorial board. He writes on local, state and national issues when he’s not trying to live off his wife’s poker tournament winnings. He can be reached at dross@napanews.com or 256.2264

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