11/30 update:

This week, our IT team finished 'optimizing' our new site with Microsoft's new browser, Internet Explorer version 7.0. MS released their new browswer right after we launched our new site, so for the first few weeks some of our pages didn't display properly. Our coders have now finished adapting the site for the new browser so all our features should be accesible with the upgraded IE7. Thanks for your patience on that one.

Also this week, we were able to resolve an overlapping-text problem in several site sections. In Nation/World, Entertainment, and National Sports, text from the first story was overlapping our top-of-page graphic. Right after we 'fixed' it, Associated Press made changes to our feed, which then created a different display problem. All that's been resolved, so those pages now display properly.

At the corporate level, we were also able to increase server capacity this week, to handle what has turned out to be a record month of site traffic for kgw.com.

Thanks for choosing us as your source for news during an amazing November - from flooding and record rain to windstorms, ice storms and snow. And thanks for being patient as we work out the remaining bugs with our site re-launch. We're gratified to have a record number of page views and unique users in November for our site content, and are committed to continuing to improve users' experience on our site from a technical standpoint.

Frank Mungeam, Internet Site Manager

11/21 update:

The biggest concern we've heard about our re-launched site has been the time it takes for the home page to load. I'm happy to report we implemented changes today that decreased the home page download time by 20 percent! We're not done, and hope to have a second phase of changes in place after the holiday that will further speed the page's download time. Just wanted to let you know we have heard your feedback and are working on it.

Of course, we continue to stomp out technical fires as we find them. Yesterday and today, a story page display problem cropped up where on some stories the page appears black where the story should be. Hitting the "refresh" button your browser will fix this for you, but of course we're working on making sure the story pages load properly the first time. Also, a few of our content pages come directly from the AP wires - our Nation/World section and our Entertainment section. On these pages, the text from the first story has been overlapping our top graphic. Again, we've noted this and the IT team is working on these display issues.

I'll continue to keep you posted here as we clean out the 'bugs' in our new home.

Frank Mungeam, Internet Site Manager

Original Entry, November 17, 2006

A few weeks ago, kgw.com re-launched its site with the first site-wide upgrade in more than three years.

In my previous blog, I described in detail the enhanced features of the new site, including imbedded video players, more video, more interactive features, and streamlined navigation.

Our users have loved our new video player imbedded on the home page, and the ten-fold increase in video clips available on the home page. This month, video views have doubled.

But loyal kgw.com visitors have encountered challenges on our new site, some foreseen and some unexpected. I'd like to talk about some of kgw.com's "growing pains" and let you know what we're doing about them.

Here are some of the comments, questions and concerns users have shared with me:

Your new site is confusing - I can't find anything!
Our loyal visitors knew their way around our previous web site. Overnight, we still had the same great team of writers and reporters, and even more video content...but the navigation and look of the site changed.
I liken it to moving into a great new house. In the long run, you're glad to have the benefits that come from a newer, better, bigger house. But in the short run, stuff is hidden away in boxes and you can't find it. The furniture is all the same, but it's in different places and it takes a while to get used to the newness.
We hope and believe that when the dust settles, the upgraded features of our 'new house' will be worth the initial confusion. And, from a navigation standpoint, we received lots of feedback before that our long list of 25 navigation links was way too much. We purposely tried to streamline our navigation, with just 8 core links at the top of the page. Check them out - you might like what you find!

The web site loads slowly
The web site does take longer to load than before. Part of that is on purpose: We have 'optimized' the web site for video and other broadband (high-speed) features. Portland is consistently at the top of lists of most wired cities and highest broadband penetration. Studies of our web site traffic reveal that more than 90% of our visits come from computers with a high-speed connection. The site is designed to provide a rich-media experience that takes advantage of the increasingly high-speed connections available.

However, we are not satisfied with the time our page takes to load and in the coming weeks we'll be making changes behind the scenes in our coding and design that should noticeably improve page-loading while maintaining our rich-media features.

What's with the site being off line?
I have the same question! Twice since October, our web site has been off line. No one is more upset about that than we are. The servers that host our site failed, and the best technical people we have are working to figure out why that happened and how to prevent it in the future.

Your video doesn't play on my computer / The page is displaying funny
We all use "browsers" to access and surf the internet. Internet Explorer is the most commonly used browser, and 70 percent of visitors to kgw.com use IE 6.0. Kgw.com was designed to work and display well in IE6 and it does.

Right after we launched our new site, Microsoft released an 'upgrade', Internet Explorer 7.0. In IE7, text on our story pages sometimes bled into pictures; we know about that conflict and are working to optimize the site for IE7 as well.

A small but loyal group of users visits our site and others using browsers like Firefox (9 percent) and Safari (3 percent.) We have received reports of video playback problems for some users of these browsers and are working on that as well.

We are eager to optimize our site for each of these browsers so you can enjoy our content no matter which browser you use. We've created a special email box where you can report 'browser' or page problems. Details, like the URL of the page that's not working, and even screengrabs, are very helpful. With your input, we can make the site look great on all these browsers. Shoot us a note at: webtek@kgw.com.

A page / link is broken
New or old, every site has broken links here and there. With more than a thousand pages of content on our site, some links inevitably break.

And we actually appreciate it when you tell us because it helps us find and fix those problem areas. You can report broken pages to us at webtek@kgw.com. In the category of "It would be funnier if it weren't true," the 'contact us' link was broken on our site for a few days! I'm happy to report that it has been fixed.

When I load the home page, I get the top banner but its black where the content should be...
Clicking the "refresh" button on your browser should solve this one. And the good news is that our content is there, you may just have to scroll down 'below the fold' to find it. This is an intermittent problem some folks are reporting. It's one element of our effort to optimize the site for the many browsers, and browser versions out there.

When I scroll down on the page, it displays all kinds of funny rows...
You're not dreaming and your computer is not broken. It takes 4-6 seconds for our home page to load on the average broadband connection.
If you wait until the page is finished loading, then "scroll" down, the pages work.
If you try to scroll down BEFORE the page is still loading, you'll see the funny rows until it finishes loading.

These are the most common questions and comments I've received so far. We are proud of kgw.com's tradition of online journalism excellence, and through this site change we've been reminded of what a loyal and passionate audience we have. We're committed to continuing to improve our web site to meet your needs. Please feel free to click on the comments button (below) and share your feedback, good and bad. And check back here - I'll share more of your comments and provide updates as we 'unpack the boxes' in our redesigned kgw.com house.

Regards,
Frank Mungeam
Internet Site Manager, kgw.com

11 Comments

Michael said:

I have expirienced some of these problems myself. I am glad they are being fixed. Thanks.

November 20, 2006 12:11 PM

Richard Utt said:

Good, you are going in the right direction.
I hated your old web site,
- winner of Edward Murrow award, who voted ?

Thanks Richard. The Edward R. Murrow Awards are voted on by RTNDA, the Radio-Television News Directors Associations.
We're proud that KGW has been selected Best TV station website in the Northwest region three times in the last four years. --Frank

November 20, 2006 12:35 PM

Dee Hanscom said:

Why don't the forums work? Thanks.
-- Dee, we have had to turn the forums off because spammers were filling all the categories with junk :-(
We're working on filters to block them and will add forums back when we can give our users a spam-free experience.

Frank Mungeam, Site Manager

December 7, 2006 6:36 AM

Eltear said:

Appreciate the improvements to website. Solid design and content, easy navigation, (almost) perfect, except for one pretty important thing -- access to video clips.

As a member of the meager 9 percent non MS users (I use Firefox as my mac browser) I would be grateful if you could fix this compatibility problem with your video player. Honestly makes me smile to think that I can easily view videos on the local newspaper site ... but can't get the video from my favorite tv station to work!

Ahh well your text looks great and is very well written, for the most part. Thanks for the great effort.

-- Thanks Eltear. We just re-launched our video player page, and it has new support for Mac. Please let us know how it works for you. We value our Mac users, too!

Frank Mungeam
Internet Site Manager

December 18, 2006 3:55 PM

Jim Sloan said:

I am just about tired of the problems with your website. The stories selected are great but I am getting really frustrated by not being able to read them. The overlaps and the black background is ruining your site attendance. I wrote over a month ago and was assured that the problem was soon to be fixed but I have seen no change. Maybe you should just go back to the old format.

-- Jim, we were indeed having some terrible "black page" problems there for a while. I'm happy to report that the underlying problem has been resolved for some time now.
Should you see this ever pop up again, feel free to shoot us a note at: newsdesk@kgw.com.

Thanks,
Frank Mungeam
KGW.com site manager

December 26, 2006 5:22 PM

Ian said:

Great refresh of the website! Thank you for the handy video clips on the home page in the upper right.

December 28, 2006 1:57 PM

Elaine said:

KGW has always been my favorite TV station. So when I got my computer a couple of years back, I made you my home page. Over the years your site has just become a mess. It takes forever for it to come up. The page is covered with advertisements of all kinds. News has taken a back seat to ads. I got tired of it and left KGW. Then a short while back I thought I'd give KGW another try. Which I did. Only to find that things are worse now not better. You are not improving your website for your customers. You are totally involved in ads, ads and more ads. In my opinion you've lost your professionalism and insite into what a homepage should be. You ask for my URL above. Now tell me why you need this information?? In order to do some things on the homepage one must become 'a member'. Why would I do this? So that you can then fill my mail box with your infernal advertisements? You must think your viewers/readers are crazy or totally ignorant. In essence, I will not sign up to be a member and as of today I will not use you as my home page again. I'm afraid KGW suffers from the same disease as this country....GREED.

Oh now that I've submitted the above you tell me you will decide if the comments are malicious or not. My comments were not malicious but I'll bet you decide they are because they reflect negative but true comments regarding your website. Thank God you're not in charge of books and libraries.

--Elaine, we appreciate your candor. As the news content manager of kgw.com, I'd probably prefer a world with no ads, and not just on KGW.com. I'd love to watch TV without ads, get a magazine where half the content wasn't inserts and ads, and a newspaper that wasn't laden with ads. As long as web content is free to users, all of us who surf the web will probably continue to be esposed to a mix of ads and content on sites.
Our kgw.com content team will focus on continuing to strive to provide excellent local news and information in the content areas of the kgw.com web site. We're proud to have just won the AP Award for 2007 for Best Oregon TV Web Site, and we will strive to continue that tradition of excellence for our users.

Frank Mungeam
Internet Site Manager

January 4, 2007 1:39 PM

Tracey said:

This has nothing really to do with this topic, except that on your lovely website I can not find contact information for this affiliate of NBC. If you could pass this on to the powers that be, it would be appreciated.

I reason for this posting is to request that you let NBC know that we (the viewers) do not you to cancel Passions. I think the key factor it demographic with the 18-24. No other show draws that demogrphic in daytime the way Passions does.

--Hi Tracy, we've added a link under INSIDE KGW TV on the home page, so you can now link to/contact NBC. Thanks for the suggestion.

Frank Mungeam
Internet Site Manager

January 8, 2007 8:36 AM

Steve Lister said:

I really like the web site. Am new to it but everything works fine so far.

January 18, 2007 8:49 AM

REX R. BAHR said:

Where is the CONTACT US site? HOT. REX R. BAHR

-- Rex, You'll find CONTACT US on the home page, just click on INSIDE KGW TV and then CONTACT US.

Frank Mungeam,
Internet Site Manager

January 31, 2007 12:51 PM

Sharon Jarman said:

I first must compliment the station on your newsteam, everyone is exceptionally good and professtional.
My complaint, however, is too much of Britney Spears, Paris Hilton, Anna Nicole Smith and any other celebrity of the moment. I have watched Britney shave her head for at least the five last nights.
If I wanted to be updated on the latest happenings which I don't, I could watch Inside Edition and any other "happening shows."

My husband and I lived in the LA area for approximately 13 years (I'm a native Oregonian!) and we had our fill of celebrity news. It was to be expected as that was news of that area but up here Portland.
Thanks for the opportunity
Sharon

February 19, 2007 7:06 PM

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