Results tagged “website”

• There's still some skepticism as to whether or not President Obama will make the trip to Copenhagen on the eve of the IOC's October 2nd vote for the 2016 Olympic games.
• Speaking of the Olympics, in the latest edition of one poll that measures where city's rank with their bids, Chicago is now second behind Rio.
• WBEZ talked to local Congressmen to see where they stand on health care reform in the wake of President Obama's speech last night.

In case you haven't noticed - but chances are you probably have - the Chicago Tribune has gone live with its new redesign. It's a bit tab-heavy, but we kind of dig it. To the right side of the page is a feedback button which, when clicked, brings up a window that allows for, well, feedback (pic #3 above). So it seems like it's still a work in progress. Perhaps the biggest grievance we have with the redesign as shifting the "Chicago Breaking News" window to below the main story and, for us, anyway, forcing us to scroll to get to it. But, otherwise, we see some promise in the site's new look. Agree with us? Think we're crazy? Let us know in our comments.

Here's how to spin some bad news into good news: We're certainly not wasting any stimulus funds to construct a decent website about the spending of our stimulus funds. How do we know this? The organization Good Jobs First has rated the websites of all 50 states [pdf] to see how well they report their spending of stimulus money, how detailed the information is, and so on - and Illinois sucked bad.

It seems there are a lot of Norwegians coming to town or there are lots of public transit enthusiasts. It seems Norway ranks first in total hits from foreign countries for the CTA's website, having registered 15,395 hits on the CTA's bus tracker website from the country over the last year. But why? Tourism plans, sure. Maybe they're researching the home city of President-Elect Barack Obama, who's considered a "celebrity" in Eruope. Or, perhaps, they're trying to steal our secrets. Whatever the case, it seems the visits are intentional.

But it doesn't appear that most of those 15,000-plus Norwegian folks happened along to the Bus Tracker site by accident because 75 percent of them clicked through to visit other pages on the CTA Web site and spent more than 18 minutes there before moving on, officials said. "Many people just like to watch buses on their computer, even if they are not planning a trip," CTA spokeswoman Noelle Gaffney said.

Enthusiasts just watching mass transit systems? Hmmm. Sounds familiar. Filipinos spent the longest average time on the site at 32 minutes, which is usually how long we have to wait for the North Ave. bus. ZING!

The CTA today unveiled their revamped website and our first impression is holy hell, this is sooooo much nicer than the crappy, old design which looked like it was a GeoCities page from 1996. The new easier-to-use and much better organized interface seems to have taken a page from the iPhone design, icon-wise. The organization of the train lines and buses also makes it much easier to find what you're looking for. Now, when you select a bus or train schedule, rather than automatically opening a PDF of the route information, it takes you to a new, revamped homepage for each route/line which contains concise information for each route/line and from which you can choose to download the PDF at your leisure.

Yesterday we were walking around Daley Plaza, looking to get a little photo-artistic during our lunch break, when we came across this guy exercising his First Amendment right the old-fashioned, analog way. His name is Paul, and his Website, advertised on his placard, attempts to expose "the lies, manipulation and counterfeiting on Wall Street." Let's hope he's got enough bandwidth! ROMS features, among other things, links to bailout coverage, YouTubes of news interviews, and other stuff related to naked short selling and other financial things we don't understand (because we don't have any investments...or own any money, come to think of it).

In news of the bored today, the Chicago Public Library finally updated their website. You know the one that was just white with a little bit of green and just linked to a bunch of PDFs? Now it's all pretty and red and green like, yeah, kind of like a Christmas tree, but the redesign is better organized and most exciting, has an entire section devoted to digital media with ebooks, audio books, and archival photos available.