Welcome to a new DTH online experience

Well, it’s finally happened.

Visitors to dailytarheel.com today might be a bit surprised by what they find. Let it be known that today The Daily Tar Heel is releasing its newly redesigned website rebuilt from the ground up — complete with a new layout, a new visual style and a completely new way of organizing content.

This redesign has been a long time coming.

Our previous website was just less than 5 years old — millennia in internet-time — and was largely outdated both visually and structurally.

After about a year and a half of planning and developing, we are finally ready to unleash a new online experience for our readers, one that complements our print version with coverage and content you won’t find anywhere else.

It’s possible that you’re asking yourself: Why’d we do this?

What was wrong with the old site? What makes this new site so much better? These are all excellent questions. There are quite a few reasons why we felt this redesign was necessary.

First, we’ve updated the whole visual look of dailytarheel.com.

Gone is the old blue-and-gray color scheme, and in its place is a more contrast-centered style.

We felt this would better organize the page by leading the eye to important places. We’ve also modernized the site’s look by implementing new layouts, new fonts and a completely new nav bar.

The site is also now responsive to all kinds of different devices and screen sizes.

Instead of providing different apps or web addresses among desktop, tablet or mobile versions, the new dailytarheel.com provides the same experience on all devices by repositioning content based on the device of your choice.

Now, no matter what device you prefer to use, you will get the same dailytarheel.com experience, anytime you want and anywhere!

Finally, the site now has a completely new architecture that better captures how our audience searches for content.

Whereas before articles and content were organized based on the DTH’s internal news desks — University, City State, etc. — now we’ve organized all online content based on the topics readers care about most — Student Life, Inside UNC, Politics, etc.

This new structure provides an organization that allows stories to be found under the topics that define them, instead of the DTH desk that writes about it.

This redesign is not the end of the changes, mind you.

Throughout the next few months we’ll be tweaking and making little improvements to ensure that the new site continues to meet the needs of The Daily Tar Heel’s readership. Head to the new dailytarheel.com for a short explainer on how to navigate the site.

Should you have any comments, questions, or if you find a bug or two, be sure to send them our way.

To progress!