Our development team is on an improvement roll lately, rebuilding parts of the site based on better use cases given how both our readers AND our newsroom staff/producers are using charlotteobserver.com.
For our slideshows, which get a very large amount of traffic, we wanted to address the following:

Initial load time. This was priority one.
Slide [...]

When we launched the new CharlotteObserver.com last summer, there were four options available on our /contact form: contact the newsroom, advertising, subscribe, and report an issue. Anything else was handled in the top area of the header I call the “tri-nav” or simply not addressed.

The old form with lots of options.
Fast forward 10 months, [...]

One might consider us ADD if you think that we just did a major release on thatsracin.com about two months ago. But that’s not the whole story.
Our parent company, McClatchy, helped us with a user study that showed our racing readers wanted more images and a more entertainment-looking site. So we dove in.
Visually, [...]

As those who have heard me speak publicly about what I do at The Charlotte Observer know, I defer all editorial discussion to our newsroom — in this case, the editor of thatsracin.com, Bob Henry. He will have his own notes about the journalistic mission/direction for the product.
This post is about the [...]