Willamette Week Partners With Washington Post on New Website

You may have noticed a new look for Willamette Week's website Monday—bolder graphics, quicker loading time, easier navigability.

Today we can announce that our new site is the result of a partnership between WW and The Washington Post. The Post selected us as the first media company on the planet to use it's Arc Publishing content management system, which will allow the best content in the state of Oregon to be published cleanly on any device.

As our own web editor, Lizzy Acker told The Post: "We are thrilled to be partnering with The Post and honored to be the first news organization to work with them. The ease of use, the flexibility of design and the knowledge of The Post's team has been nothing short of remarkable."

The Post is, of course, owned by a Seattle guy named Jeff Bezos. His team at The Post has built an incredible tool, and we're excited to be using it.

Arc uses WordPress, but with what we can describe in layman's terms as a flexible ubertheme that allows publishers to build any page from scratch, moving modules around with ease. Readers will notice the change starting with the dynamic front page, which can be frequently adapted to highlight content we think will be of most interest to readers at any given moment, and give every story exactly the amount of play it deserves.

Even with the technical limitations of our old site, our web traffic has doubled in each of the last two years. We're confident our clean, intuitive and stable new site will help us grow further.

The best thing about the new site is its flexibility. Already, we've made a number of small improvements based on feedback from readers—for example, as of this morning we dramatically shrank the social media toolbar below the menu after hearing that it was detracting from some readers' experience. If you have other suggestions, feel free to leave them in the comments below or email them to web@wweek.com.

Willamette Week