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Tuesday, July 04, 2006
Jonathan Garthwaite :: Townhall.com Columnist
Pulling back the curtain
by Jonathan Garthwaite
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What was the biggest suprise of Election Day?



This is it. The new Townhall.com is finally here. After forcing all of you to look at the 'coming soon' page for the last two days, the wait is over. The Townhall.com team has been hard at work trying to build everything and the kitchen sink. The curtain has been pulled back and you’re all invited to take a look around. I hope you like what you see.

As the oldest, biggest, and best conservative site out there for more than a decade, Townhall.com is about to make an even more dramatic impact on the national political discussion.

The new Townhall.com offers an arsenal of weapons for conservatives to win the battle of ideas. The liberals will try to dismiss us but we know better. This is the start of something big and the stakes in 2006 and 2008 couldn’t be higher.

Joining the Townhall.com community are talk radio’s finest, Bill Bennett, Mike Gallagher, Dennis Prager, Michael Medved, and our Executive Editor, Hugh Hewitt. Each has their own page on Townhall where you can listen to their shows, read their blogs, comment on their shows, and interact with other listeners.

Want to listen to Townhall Talk in your car? Then check out our podcasts, which can be pulled into your iPod to listen to anytime. Want to listen live on the radio? Then enter your zip code and find out what time and what radio station to tune to for Townhall Talk Radio.

Townhall.com is growing dramatically, and in addition to the dozens and dozens of conservative writers you’ve counted on Townhall.com for, we’ve added several new ones including William Rusher, Don Lambro, Roger Schlesinger, Rich Galen, Jay Sekulow, Lori Byrd among others and regular columns from Bennett, Gallagher, Prager, Hewitt and Medved.

What’s Hot?

What should I read? That’s the question we are all faced with as we’re presented with dozens of magazines, Web sites, newspaper stories, and blogs. Your time is precious. Townhall.com has always taken seriously our responsibility to cull through the massive amount of material out there and find the very best. Now we’re giving you a part of the action. By voting on which columns you like, which blog posts were most interesting, and which news stories were most informative, you’ll help your fellow readers. Townhall’s What’s Hot is a reader-determined selection of the very best from the Townhall community. The best columns, blogs, and podcasts according to you.

Speaking of YOU – you can have a new home on the web. With Townhall.com, you can create your own blog right next to Ann Coulter, Hugh Hewitt, Thomas Sowell, and the whole Townhall.com gang. You can post your own commentary, your thoughts on Congress, media bias, the state of our nation – the sky’s the limit. Try it today. We want to hear what you think. You might even hit the big time if enough of your fellow readers like your blog. Townhall has it’s own blog too where we keep a 24/7 vigil for conservative values – keeping you informed and up-to-date on the political battles at hand. You can talk back, too, by commenting on blog posts.

Can’t decide what movie to see this weekend? Why not let Townhall.com’s very own Michael Medved and Megan Basham give you the lowdown on the new movies to go see or to stay away from. Don’t stop there. If you’ve seen the movie then join in the punditry and rate the movie your self.

Can’t decide what book to start reading? Townhall has the reviews. From our regular reviewers and from YOU. Did you like a book you’ve recently read and think the rest of us should read it too? Then sign up and send in your own review. Continued...

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About The Author

Jonathan Garthwaite is the editor-in-chief of Townhall.com.

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This Is Truly Ridiculous!
I had thought the numbering of a list of items was stripped when I copied and pasted from Word so I repeated the post after manually restoring the numbers and blank lines separating the list items but they were again stripped by the submission process! Why in the world would anyone waste even a single line of code to do this?!? I give up!

The New TownHall II
Yes, this is a (near) duplicate post occasioned by formatting lost when I copied the original from Word without checking closely enough. Sorry. ease ignore the earlier post.

After three weeks of using the new TownHall, it's time for me to weigh in with a considered opinion and some suggestions.

Before I get started though, let me describe my background and my Internet environment; these obviously color my opinions of your site and may help you evaluate this post. I retired nearly two years ago after 30+ years in IT; mostly as a Systems Programmer in the large mainframe environment. Part of my job a few years ago was the design, creation, and maintenance of a large (200+ pages) web site.

I sometimes access TownHall.com from my desktop PC via a cable broadband connection but usually read your news and columnist pages on my Pocket PC/cell phone. Before you discount the rest of this post as being not representative of your target audience, ask yourself if you really want to appeal only to those who have the time and inclination to sit in front of a PC monitor for extensive periods or if you wouldn't rather include on-the-go movers and shakers who might access your site during their commute times or other odd moments. I'm not asking you to tailor your site to these very small screens (mine is only 1 23/32 x 2 5/16) but it would be nice if you would keep this part of your audience in mind.

While I generally think you have improved TownHall, I have to agree with previous posters in some important criticisms and add a couple of my own:

1..Loading of your new pages is painfully slow in comparison to other pages at the same time of day and on the same device. I've even gotten in the habit of tapping a link and then resuming a game while waiting for a page to load on my Pocket PC.

2..Many of the ads on your new pages, in addition to being major contributors to slow page loading, are obnoxiously intrusive and therefore counterproductive. Companies whose ads get in the way of my reading my favorite columnists are added to the list of companies that I refuse to patronize. The other side of that coin is that I would be willing to pay a subscription fee for a TownHall that had no more advertising than links to sellers of books reviewed or referenced on your site.

3..Your developers may indeed be recent high school graduates as one post suggested. They are clearly much more proficient in graphic design than in the technicalities of web site creation. You really need to evaluate the new TownHall with your goals in mind: Do you want to be THE web site of conservative thought and dialog or just another gee-whiz collection of eye-catching graphics and photos? I don't think you can be both.

4..Separation of longer articles into two or more web pages might be more expedient for some readers but let me decide when I first select an article whether I want short pages or the entire piece (with or without comments). You might even allow me to put my default selection in my user profile so that articles are normally displayed the way I want to see them.

5..And, speaking of comments, you must restore the capability of replying to a comment and the arrangement of comments with the oldest first. The order of comments is something else you might want to make selectable in each user's profile.

6..Your news content and updating need some more attention. Friday's news on Monday morning just doesn't cut it; surely something happened over the weekend. And while you're working on your news pages, please add a dateline to each article showing the geographic origin of the story, its date and time, the source (AP, Reuters, etc.), and, whenever possible, the author(s).

In spite of all that criticism, I really do like your site and am particularly pleased that I can now enter comments from my Pocket PC. I don't know what you did to make that happen but I thank you for it.

Like any user of IT services, though, there are some features I'd like to see you add. First, let me edit and spell check --- even delete --- my own posts. Then give me the option to be notified by eMail when someone else replies to my post. Another nice option would be for me to be notified when anyone posts a comment to a selected article. It would also be very nice if my profile could include a list of other users whose posts I want to ignore and, to be fair, a count of other users who are ignoring me. Finally, a help page describing posting of comments and replies --- particularly the formatting of them --- would be very useful.
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