New Layout
The first and easiest feature to see is that we have a completely redesigned the web site layout. Gone is the page full of boxes and the vertical right-side menu. It has been replaced by a vertical menu at the top and a more open and spacious design of the text. It was designed with the maximum amount of readability in mind, and hopefully is more clear and easy on the eyes than the previous version.
Sources, Comments and Tags
The biggest improvement from the previous web site is the number of properties each story has. Most stories are accredited to one or more sources now, such as Chun Go-eun or Matthew Weigand. These names are clickable and lead to a page on which every story of each author is listed. Stories also have comments associated with them, so anyone who has something to contribute can add their own thoughts with the click of a button. It is not required to register to post comments at the site, but it is more convenient.
In preparation for more community interaction, each story can be tagged with user-created tags. The tags are collected together and measured against each other in the Tag Cloud. This gives a visual illustration of the popularity of various tags on the web site at any given moment. Finally, stories can be added to social bookmarking sites using conveniently placed icons at the bottom of the story page.
Image Galleries
Another major change to the content of the web site is the way images are handled. Images now are high resolution, automatically-captioned entities of their own. They exist independently of the story they are associated with and can be found independently through searches. They are also arranged into galleries, and low, medium, and original resolutions are available for anyone who wants to download them. This is a deviation from the practices of traditional old media sites such as the BBC or CNN, which only offer small-sized barely discernible resolutions of their images.
Blogs
Yet another new feature, not precisely of the web site design but rather inspired by it, are several blogs that the staff of the Korea IT Times has started. We have begun an official blog, which can be found linked on the official page, and a number of individual blogs which can be found linked from the official blog. Some of these are in English, and some are in Korean, based on each person's preference.
Categories
The content of the existing web site is now much more accessible as well. All of the content of the previous 5 years of the magazine has been divided into 27 discrete sections, which are all easily available at the top of the page. Previously, due to the large number of categories - 285 in all - categories were only available during a particular month when a new story had been added to the site. However, now all categories are always available and their archives can be read at any time.
Google-friendly
There are some technical changes to the site as well to make it more Google-friendly. Each story has its own URL which includes most of the words of the headline in it. Additionally, the title of the web page which is visible in most web browser's title bars contains the headline of the article as well. This makes it much easier for Google's bots to identify the content of the page and direct other people to it.
All of the articles in the magazine are now accessible by one static text link - they can be seen by first clicking on the category link and then perhaps paging through the pages of the categories. This is also important for search engine bots to find the site.
The URL of the site also changes with every link click. Previously, no matter what links a user clicked at the previous web site, the address in the address bar would remain the same. This made it difficult for bookmarking articles and for sharing articles. However, now each article can be directly accessed by simply copying and pasting or bookmarking the exposed link.
Finally, user-created comments and tags will be the final ingredient to make the web site more search-engine friendly.
