MidWeek’s Website Receives Facelift

Years ago, in addition to my wonderful geeky job in the systems department, I was also honored to be MidWeek’s webmaster. Every week I would tediously update it, and even though I didn’t create the website from its beginning, I still think of it as sort of my baby. Well, the time has come . . . midweek.com has received a nice facelift thanks to the hard work and countless hours Online Advertising Director Troy Fujimoto put in.

The new and improved midweek.com includes your favorite stories from MidWeek, and now MidWeek the weekend. The top portion of the webpage links to Island Homes, job listings, Wheels and Star Classifieds. The Quick Links feature on the right side gives you access to the newspapers’ classified ads, retail ads, coupons, legal notices, travel ads and the popular Bidding Advantage online “auction.” The left sidebar includes links to just about everything else with MidWeek and the weekend’s cover and feature stories, business, the editor’s desk, entertainment, food, lifestyle, movies, sports/fitness, travel, classified ads and the Click Chick Corner by yours truly.

One of the more appealing features of the new design is that you can see the two newspaper full-color covers of the week right when you go to the homepage. The teaser text/link under the covers takes you right to the respective cover stories. Right under that you see the feature stories, Newsmaker, Don Chapman’s special section covering his visit to South Korea, Food, Kimo’s Vegas Travel, Entertainment, Sports/Fitness, Politics, movie reviews, business and lifestyle. In addition, there’s also a link to our sister newspaper the Honolulu Star-Bulletin (www.starbulletin.com) with links to some key stories located on the bottom right of the page.

The new midweek.com design definitely makes it easier to share MidWeek with those who do not receive it in their mailbox. You now have the ability to comment on stories, e-mail a friend, or access a printer-friendly page, standard features most websites would have these days. According to Fujimoto, the best added feature is the RSS feed for each columnist. It’s definitely an excellent feature, but for those of you who don’t know what an RSS feed is. . . it stands for Real Simple Syndication. It’s basically a service (usually free) that allows Internet users to subscribe to websites, such as ours. It’s typically used for news websites and weblogs (blogs). For example, you can RSS feed the text of our columnists onto your iPod or into a screen saver.

Don’t forget to check out www.midweek.com for yourself and share it with your away-from-home ohana.