We have a new site! The Cagle Post!
Our new site, CaglePost.com, is born out of years of my frustration with editors who can’t see that cartoons are as powerful, or more powerful, than words. We’ve gathered most of the top newspaper columnists, along with our great selection of top editorial cartoonists, and we mix them together in a continuous, chronological flow, with the new cartoons and columns appearing as soon as they are released. and with cartoons getting equal play on the site with the columns. I think it is already the best news/opinion site on the web.
On The Cagle Post front page the newest columns show up at the top of the middle of the page. In the left column we have a list of each columnist with their most recent column along with archives and RSS feeds for each columnist. At the right we have topics, where you can see a mix of columns and cartoons by topic, and subscribe to a topical RSS feed.
We’ve been beta testing the new Cagle Post site for a couple of months with our newsletter audience and we’ve gotten lots of good advice and ideas from our readers. One thing readers wanted to do was leave comments with each cartoon, and we have some active discussions going for both the columns and cartoons. The most recent comments can be seen on the front page, click on a comment to go to the cartoon or column that is the subject of debate.
We also have a great new slate of free e-mail newsletters, where our readers can subscribe to any or all of the Cagle.msnbc.com cartoonists and their favorite columnists.
Our Cagle.msnbc.com site is growing old; it is still a collection of separate html files that is managed the same way we did it ten years ago. The new Cagle Post site is database driven and gives us a path to upgrade and modernize the Cagle.msnbc.com site. We may combine the two sites in the future, or The Cagle Post may go its separate way, we’re not quite sure, but for now, The Cagle Post is a separate site.
We’ve gotten some complaints from readers who don’t like the one cartoon per column and thumbnail displays on The Cagle Post; they prefer the way we show the cartoons now, by artist, with many cartoons on each page. Don’t worry, our current site and multi-cartoon layout are here to stay; when we upgrade, we won’t be changing the layout you are comfortable with. The Cagle Post site just provides different ways to see the cartoons.
Part of the reason for the redesign was the “Search for a Cartoon” link in the left column here on Cagle.msnbc.com – we haven’t had a good search function for cartoons here because of our archaic setup; the link used to go to our online store at Politicalcartoons.com where we had a nice search script. What happened was, over time, more and more readers found Politicalcartoons.com through this link and preferred the Politicalcartoons.com format for browsing the most recent cartoons. Over time the traffic on Politicalcartoons.com grew to millions of page views and it became clear that people didn’t really want a store – they really just wanted to look at and search for the cartoons in the thumnail, dated format of our store. In fact, the audience on Politicalcartoons.com has grown to the point where it is about the same size as our huge audience on Cagle.msnbc.com – we knew we had to make a change, and that’s why the Cartoon Ticker page on The Cagle Post looks and works just like Politicalcartoons.com.
As time goes by, we’ll be gently nudging our readers to do their pleasure reading on The Cagle Post ticker page, to move them out of our Politicalcartoons.com store and into a different reading room. Don’t worry, any changes to Cagle.msnbc.com will not disrupt your daily routines and will not change the look and feel of our site.
Give The Cagle Post a try – unlike other opinion sites like Townhall.com, our site has no political agenda. We have liberals and conservatives together on the same topics. And we have the best cartoons presented in the way that many of you prefer. Come! Look! Be angry and leave a comment! And subscribe to our new newsletters and RSS feeds!
There’s nothing else like it!
