Our philosophy has always been that content is king. And that certainly is the case with the new WRAL.com, coming this month to a computer screen near you.

In addition to all of the content you've come to depend on -- breaking news, local news, national news, weather, sports, traffic, 5 On Your Side restaurant ratings, Health Team reports -- we've added some new content to help you plan what to do in your spare time.

In Entertainment, we've added local movie listings that can be sorted by city or movie title. There also are new comprehensive event listings that can be searched by date, venue and performer. And we still have our Community Calendar, to which you can contribute events.

In Sports, we've improved the amount and organization of content we receive from The Sports Network. Scores will update faster, and you'll have access to game previews, recaps and box scores for just about every college and pro sport.

Weather has more of what you...

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We've got plenty of exciting changes in the soon-to-be released WRAL.com redesign, but my personal favorite is video.


Video will be easier to find and faster to load. We've switched to the Flash video format for all of our on-demand, or non-live, video clips. Flash video results in a much better user experience. Gone are the long lag times between when a visitor clicks on a link and the video plays. Flash also plays better on Macs, which have had trouble with our existing video formats.

We'll have more live video than ever. From our new player, you will be able to watch our live WRAL.com NewsChannel, the WeatherCenter Channel, Doppler5000 and all of our newscasts. And you'll always have quick access to the lateset WRAL newscast. Thumbnail images, updated once a minute, give you a real-time glimpse of what is playing on each channel.

Our new video player has a series of tabs that makes it easy to find video by topics such as Live, On Demand, NewsChannel,...

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We hear occasionally from users who are frustrated that they can't find a story or piece of content mentioned in a newscast. And we sympathize. Our site is both large and frequently changing. We update the homepage more than 20 times a day on average. Stories move on an off to other sections quickly.

That makes it challenging to direct WRAL News viewers to content on our Web site. The new design addresses that by creating navigation keywords that are recognized by our search engine.

Let's say Monica Laliberte has a story about an area restaurant closing after receiving poor sanitation ratings, and she wants to direct you to our online database of health ratings for restaurants. In the past, we might have said "Check out the health ratings database on WRAL.com, or go to WRAL.com and click on Consumer." You might have found the health ratings -- or maybe not.

After the new site launches, we can now direct WRAL News viewers to search on specific navigation...

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OK, I'll be the first to admit that our current search engine is not up to snuff. In fact, it is down right pathetic at times. Don't blame our tech staff for that. In fact, give them lots of credit for devising a new site search that really delivers for visitors.

The new site search allows you to sort by date, relevance, section, headline. It also gives you the option of only seeing search results for video clips or images. And you can quickly search for content published in the past day, week, month or year.

The results pages themselves are dramatically improved. We borrowed heavily from the familiar and popular Google design, and we added thumbnail images if visual assets are present inside on the stories returned in the search.

And unlike our current search engine, this one indexes section fronts, special content pages and other types of content other than just stories.

So try the new site search, even if you aren't having trouble finding...

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One of the biggest aims of our new design, which will launch later this month, was to make WRAL.com easier to navigate.

In the course of six years, we added a lot of content to the site, and we typically added new tabs or buttons to our main navigation menu to get you to that new content. The result was a sprawling navigation bar with too many choices and confusing layout.

In the new design, we have kept the horizontal menu bar at the top of the pages because it's familiar to our users and usability research has found that visitors prefer that location for navigation.

But we put the main navbar, as well call it, on a diet. We did this by adhering to a pretty strict hierarchy for content. We then added a sub-menu for each main section. You'll find it directly below the main menu. This gives you a quick way to drill down to content that falls within our hierarchy.

We also grouped all of our main news categories together, and then moved links...

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