New & improved website unveiled

If you have been a regular visitor to our website, www.leaderunion.com, you likely already know that we have unveiled a new and improved product.
If you haven’t been a regular visitor, check it out.
Our new website offers more content, is much more reader-friendly and allows more opportunities for you, our readers, to participate in our online version of The Leader-Union.
The reader participation features are among the things that we are most excited about. Those features include public forums, where readers can offer comments on public issues, and blogs, where we plan to have staff members and people in the community talking about various activities and areas of special interest.
And while we want people to participate in those features, we want to point out that the guidelines for them are much like those we have for our print edition.
We want people to make comments and offer opinions, but this is not an opportunity to libel others, and we hope that these do not become a forum for posters to attack or belittle subjects in stories or each other, as has been the case with many websites. A good rule of thumb that we’ve seen before is, “Don’t say anything on our website that you wouldn’t say to your mother.”
We will watch for those who don’t follow the guidelines, and a feature allows other readers to notify us of posts that they feel are inappropriate. Those who do not post within our guidelines can be blocked from participating in future blogs and forums.
Other new features include our Pet of the Week, in which those viewing the website cannot only learn about others’ pets, but may also nominate their own pets by using the form online.
Linked with the Pet of the Week feature is Adopt A Pet, a service through which we are joining with Second Chance Animal Rescue to find good homes for animals that are taken in by the rescue.
Features on the home page include an enhanced community calendar, which lists area meetings, special events and activities by date. Users of our website are encouraged to post events on the calendar.
We are continuing to offer photo slide shows and videos, and they are now available in the Multimedia category.
Also on the homepage is a list of links to other websites in the community. Users can add to that list, as long as the website is not for a commercial business.
You’ll also notice that our website includes a map feature. If there is a particular area or location mentioned in a story, the map feature can be used to pinpoint that area or location.
This is our first week with the website, so we anticipate that there will be some fine-tuning down the road. But we’re excited about all that www.leaderunion.com has to offer, and hope that you are, too.
rb