What’s New on WDET.org?
The new wdet.org is designed to make life better, both for you and our team here at WDET.
Technology and media are changing at a rapid pace. WDET is rising to meet this challenge as a cutting-edge public media service that is everywhere you are, on any device you choose, with the quality you expect and deserve.
The new wdet.org is designed to make life better, both for you and our team here at WDET. We worked with our developers to create an online destination that will inform you, generate dialogue and help people explore and engage with the many facets of Detroit. At the heart of wdet.org are stories from our award-winning news team, hosts and producers – and the music that keeps us moving. The new user experience and design just makes it easier for you to discover and engage with everything you already love.
The new WDET.org is made possible by the supporters of the WDET Tech Upgrade. Learn about the other improvements we’ve made >>
What all has changed:
WDET.org adapts to whatever device you’re on. Check out the site on your desktop, laptop, phone, tablet, flip it around or upside down. Either way, it looks great. It’s called responsive design and it’s built to respond to your devices!
We’ve created a user-friendly layout that is beautifully designed and driven by multimedia content. We know you come to WDET for music, news and great stories and conversations. That’s why our new site puts content first. It’s built to display more photos, audio and video – and better integrate them into each story to give you a richer experience. Design tweaks like increased white space, a new font and a paired down color palette also improve readability. Translation – it’s easier on the eyes.
All of our streams in one place. The new live player features all three of our streams with room for more – and the quality of each has improved! You can listen to our main channel 101.9FM and Alpha, our all-music channels that regularly features electronic music made in the Motor City. Just launch and click “streams” in the online player to view a listing.
We made it easier for you to find what you’re looking for. The new home page features current stories and things you’ve recently heard on air. At the end of each post there is a list of related content powered by a new algorithm. We’ve also optimized the website’s search engine. We’re still working on migrating all the old content onto our new platform. If you can’t find a story you’re looking for here, you can access our archives at archives.wdet.org.
You may not use it, but our content management system (CMS) is awesome! The CMS is the back end of our site that WDET producers and reporters use to create stories online. We learned many lessons with our old version and have built this one to streamline our process for creating posts. That means news and information gets to you faster!
Sharing is caring. And being able to @follow is even better. We’ve updated our social sharing icons and made it simple to tweet the stories you like. Click the Tweet This button on any story and see what happens! It’s magic. (Not really, we’ve just limited our post descriptions be tweets-friendly). Also, you can now follow your favorite reporter, show, series or topic by importing their RSS feed into your favorite reader. Looking for a good one? Check out +feedly.
Believe it or not, you are at the center of all of this. The data from our site analytics was a driving force in the redesign of wdet.org. We took a hard look at user behavior to restructure site navigation and page layouts in a way that meets your needs. We also stuck with Disqus as our comment platform to continue the dialogue between listeners and our staff.
There is nothing permanent except change. This quote may be from a pre-Socratic Greek philosopher, but it’s still relevant to our modern Information Age. WDET strives to be a cutting-edge public media service for Detroit, which means updating our technology and digital platforms is a continuous process. It doesn’t stop here. We will continue to make improvements to wdet.org.
Share your feedback and first impressions of the new site. This helps us determine what changes and new features we should add in the future. Send in your feedback to our digital team at feedback@wdet.org or through this survey.
