The Sentinel's "This is Staffordshire" gets a new look

For anyone visiting thisisstaffordshire today, your in for a bit of surprise.

Northcliffe Newspapers have consulted with one another to bring you a brand new design with a less cluttered home page, where stories, and comments are first things that you see, We've now lost the sprawling page of story after story, which has been replaced with a smaller compact news box, which when you scroll over a story, a large picture will load in.

Hopefully over time, we will see the Sentinel introduce new features that will pull the next 5 older stories into the box, to save me navigating off the page at all.

Next is a very handily placed comments box, so you can see where all of the action is taking place in terms of readers take on the stories.

It's probably worth mentioning that at this point the ads are less intrusive than before, and because there is less clutter, you do see them better, which might mean this site could be more profitable than the last. The Homes and Jobs interactive ads really leap out, which might mean people start thinking of advertising locally again before they turn to the likes of autotrader for their first port of call.

I also think the ticker tape that brings the news onto the home page is brilliant, how ever it does have one flaw, and that's not with the ticker tape itself, but with the human mind. I may be wrong, but when you first get to the site, you scroll around for the news, and that means you've taken your eye off the ticker tape news so you might miss something. Which is potential bad if the only way to get to a particular feature was via the ticker tape.

Anyway, further down the home page is the news section. Working exactly the same way as the news, yo are presented with a box, with stories, again limited to the five latest stories, and because it's limited to five stories I do worry that a lot of stories are going to be missed (such as the vale ones). Again I think the only way to get around this is to pull the next set of stories into the news or sport box, to save people navigating from page to page. This alone would be of special interest to mobile phone users.

Story Pages

The whole layout of the story page has been given a very clean update. The main thing for me is the stories pictures are no longer the size of a postage stamp, and shoved up the top corner, but are of a good size, so you can see what the story is getting at.

The comments receive more room, and are laid out in a much cleaner and crisper way, and now instead of being tucked away related news articles are added underneath the story.

One major omission is the ability to share stories via twitter, but hopefully they'll catch up, which is more than likely as The Sentinel are rather lucky to have one of the best web editors in Northcliffe,David Elks at it's helm.

Press release and comments on Hold the Front Page