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 to areas such as Classifieds, Autos and Real Estate in a separate row on the main menu.
The result is cleaner navigation that should make it easier for you to find what you want.

But what if you still can't find what you're looking for? We've got that handled, too. Read more about our new and improved (no, really) site search.