It’s here! We have a shiny new website that should work very well for you, our readers.
You can find it at the same address, pikespeakbulletin.org, but that’s about all that will look familiar. It’s been in the works for a while, but my Colorado Publishing House colleagues Kara Aldridge-Folger and Mike Reid spent an intensive three months carefully crafting it to meet your needs.
Let’s take a tour, starting with the home page. The first thing you’ll probably notice is that we’ve made it easy to sign up for a Bulletin subscription. The homepage link takes you to a form you can quickly fill out so you can be contacted about paying (this keeps your financial information extra-safe).
The navigation bar allows you to go straight to our digital editions, news and sports stories and letters to the editor and guest editorials. And at the right side, the Contact Us tab takes you to the page with all the information (we hope!) you’ll need to arrange advertising, submit events for the calendars and a lot more.
Right at the middle of the navigation bar, you’ll see an Events tab, which takes you to a pretty cool feature that we’ve needed to bring us into the 21st century.
This is still a work in progress, but for now you can click on events to learn more about them.
Just like the old website, this one also lists Distribution Locations so you know where you can pick up a copy while you’re out and about Manitou and the Westside.
Below that, we have a “ticker” called Updates. Right now, clicking on the text that interests you leads to stories that have already appeared in the Bulletin. As time goes on, I’ll be using the ticker to add updates about emergency construction activity, canceled or postponed events — anything you need to know before our next issue comes out.
I apologize to those of you who follow us on Facebook. I’ve been having technical problems with it and keep hoping that the company’s tech support (hah!) will finally figure out how to solve them. Fortunately, the Updates ticker should compensate for that.
You can scroll down the home page to see “Featured” content; as I write this, that highlights RATIO architects’ plans for the Carnegie Library redesign, and photos and headlines from other recent stories. That will update with each issue so you can keep up with the news.
But if you need to look back at any of our content, that’s easy too. Trying to remember what you read in a previous Volunteer Opportunities list or Police Beat? Just click on those links toward the bottom of the home page.
At the home page’s right side, you’ll find our search tool. If you remember seeing a story or brief about an event you want to attend, but you already recycled last week’s issue, just type in a distinctive word (not “Manitou”), phrase or name and click on the magnifying glass.
Below that, you can go directly to our archived digital editions, see upcoming events and find important local contact information quickly. Our searchable content goes back to October/November of 2021, but we may add more in the future.
After you click on the archived issue you want and it appears, hover your mouse over the front cover image. That brings up an arrow in the top left of the black border and you can click on that to download the entire issue.
Or, if you’d rather, use the arrows halfway down the digital page to flip through the issue. At the bottom, you’ll see a way to more quickly move through the issue, zoom in to read something, search the issue or enlarge it to fill your screen.
Please let me know if you have any questions or are experiencing difficulties with the new website. I can be reached at editor@pikespeakbulletin.org or 685-9668.
We hope you’ll enjoy exploring and using our new website!