Welcome to The Bedford Citizen‘s new web format – we hope you like it!
Ever since its founding in 2012, The Bedford Citizen has relied on a very plain and simple version of WordPress to host our website. While this format has served our readers well, The Citizen has grown considerably since then, and we have decided that it is long past time to update our website and its functionality to serve you better.
Our readership relies on a variety of devices — phone, tablet, laptop, desktop — and delivery methods — our daily email feed or weekly email summary (sign up for a free subscription), Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, and even going directly to The Citizen website, https://thebedfordcitizen.org.
One size definitely does not fit all! With this in mind, we applied our experience with what works and what doesn’t to improve your reading experience regardless of how you access The Citizen.
Beginning today, you will find a new front page arranged so you can see the most important stories of the week, other recent stories, and streamlined categories for finding related or older stories, along with a cleaner search feature.
We hope you find the updated design refreshing and useful, and we look forward to your feedback as we continue to improve your experience in reading The Citizen. You’ll still enjoy the same options of starting on Facebook, Twitter, Instagram, or our daily or weekly emails. We are not changing our Facebook page or the MailChimp service that sends out your emails.
Change is never easy, and it might take a few weeks to get used to this one. Please give it a try and let us know what you think!
For those who are interested, here’s some background on the new platform we are using. It is LARGO, a WordPress theme developed by the Institute for Nonprofit News (INN), designed specifically for news sites large and small. LARGO allowed The Citizen to quickly update to this new platform, offered the newspaper look we sought and was the most cost-effective path forward. Win. Win. Win! With LARGO, we are leveraging the experience of many other non-profit news organizations. If you are interested in local news and how it is doing around the country, you may want to check out some other successful nonprofit news sites that also utilize LARGO. A sampling can be seen at https://inn.org/2014/10/more-than-100-news-publishers-now-use-largo-project/.
While change is never easy, The Bedford Citizen is grateful to our web consultant, Bedford’s own Paula Gilarde, for the switch to our new format. Paula’s WordPress expertise and willingness to explore LARGO were instrumental in the transition to this new format.
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