I am very impressed with the functionality and design of the site. I've been reading the print edition for quite a while and did not even know there was a website until recently, so I was very pleasantly surprised when I did find it. In particular, I really like the site's ability to accept comments in response to ANY item -- story, blog post, forum post, whatever. That's a really nice, community-centric functionality.

Here are a few thoughts about items that maybe could stand some tinkering with:

• when you open "My Control Panel", the top banner ad superimposes over the controls so you cannot get to some of them




• the informal standard place to position the Search box is in the upper right; users may miss it in its present location




• animated ads are very distracting; not sure what the reaction would be from advertisers, but I'd say nix all animation on the site




• the horizontal menu bar at the top (Home, News, Most Read, etc.) has a functional problem: if you mouse over a menu (such as Multimedia) then pull your mouse pointer downwards so that it leaves the menu, the menu remains open; this blocks any text under it and can quickly clutter the top area, since you can wind up with multiple menus left open




• personally, I would lose the embedded scrollable region currently holding your top stories and replace it with a human-designed home page that emphasizes your top 2-4 stories, using a larger title font, etc.




• there generally are no line breaks between paragraphs in the posted stories making them harder to read; I'd like to see line breaks between paragraphs added wherever possible




• I think the Recent Comments section used to have a link to show All recent comments; this was an extremely useful function, since without it users cannot see any more than the few recent comments that are displayed in the short list




• links to comments made to forums that exceed a single page, such as "The Fact-Checker: Truth in Politics", lead to the first page of the forum, not to the comment itself (which will tend to be on the last page of the forum, but may not necessarily be there if someone replied to a previous comment in the thread); ideally, the links would navigate the user to the page and position where the comment itself is found, regardless of how many pages the forum occupies




• although the site indicates that images can be added to postings, I was not able to get that to work despite trying it several ways (using the IMG tag)




• I'd abolish anonymous user account names; this isn't a dating site, it's a newspaper; anonymity may make some people feel safer posting, but I don't think that is enough justification; knowing that your name will be attached to a post encourages more reflection and civility

This isn't a dating site? I thought that's why the fictionwriter does multiple posts under multiple names, multiple times a day; it's about meeting a soul mate.

I would like to complement WW on a very his very precise description of problems with the new website. I agree with WW that signing in and out is problematic because the ad-imation blocks the control panel drop-down box.

The link to forum-comments problem that WW points out (where you're brought to the top, not the bottom) existed under the old design. In the example he mentions, this is a blessing because readers have some warning before getting drawn to another one of those boring cut-n-paste jobs. Let's call it a vast right wing conspiracy and leave it at that.

Anonymous Names: First and foremost, eliminating pseudonyms would result in more honesty and less sourcing of partisan websites like Wikipeida. A downside is the fear of retaliation. If you posted something the Ashwin Madia campaign didn't like, they might send over one of their 'volunteers' to steal your scooter.

Over the course of a week, I read several news blogs from around the country. I don't know of any that prohibit the use of pseudonyms. Here's something to think about; how does a reader or the newspaper know that William Wood is actually William Wood?

WW's says his suggestion "encourages more reflection and civility." In the blogosphere, that horse has long left the barn. As I think back to the days of Dan Rather, he was neither reflective or civil.

I too have failed in attempts to add images to posts. I've seen these used in the other SW Suburban News sites, so it must be possible here.