BubbleLife has a new look and feel, more reader-friendly features and a state-of-the-art design to bring you the most comprehensive neighborhood news from communities across North Texas.
The new design is featured on all BubbleLife Media sites in a format that is original, easy to use and adaptable to whatever device you are using to read neighborhood news.
“Our commitment is to gather up all the neighborhood news and get it to where people like to read,” said Saffie Farris, Publisher of BubbleLife. “We have no paywalls, lengthy subscription forms or exclusive content. We’re open and free, serving the neighborhoods we call home.”
The biggest change to the BubbleLife website is something that is not immediately obvious to the eyes but will make using BubbleLife easier and more satisfying. BubbleLife sites now employ “responsive web design,” which means the site will respond differently to individual users based on what platform they’re using, their screen size or the orientation of their mobile device.
Boston.com, website of the Boston Globe newspaper, uses responsive web design for its market-leading site. The major benefit of the responsive design concept is that it enables site pages—layouts, fonts and images—to adjust automatically to different screen sizes. A combination of HTML5 and CSS3 design technologies helps extends BubbleLife’s digital publishing effort to the rapidly expanding tablet and smartphone universe.
Simply put, rather than creating a different design of BubbleLife for an ever-increasing number of web devices, the new “responsive web design” will treat them all as facets of the same experience. BubbleLife will look and feel different for each user, but each user will still receive an optimal viewing experience without making any sacrifices.
One of the most noticeable changes of the new look of BubbleLife is the display breakdown of stories on the site. Instead of just a long list of local stories, the stories are slotted under sections – sections devoted to news, education, real estate and other topics. This will make finding a particular story easier and relevant to you.
Each BubbleLife site will now also have two main featured stories at the top of the site instead of just one. These featured stories are changed and updated constantly and represent what the editors believe to be the top stories in the neighborhood.
Our iReporter feature still functions as it always has, making it easy for readers and viewers to report on any news that happens in their vicinity. As before, any person wanting to post in iReporter will need to have an account and be signed in. We welcome all contributions.
The new look and feel of BubbleLife compliments our other reader features, such as the email share feature, Sunday Magazine and distribution to Facebook and other social media platforms.
BubbleLife’s new look also extends to the Neighborhood Marketing Center on the site, where local merchants are able to access new web-based marketing and content tools to drive results, such as new business leads, and track and optimize their marketing performance.
“BubbleLife will continue to grow and change in order to bring readers the latest in neighborhood news,” said Farris. “We’re once again raising the bar for neighborhood news.”