About the Minnesota Public Radio Web site changes
September 10, 2006

Over the last ten years the Minnesota Public Radio Web site has been reshaped a number of times to keep up with changes in content offerings and evolving technology. Since our last major change more that two years ago, MPR has added a whole new radio station (The Current), started producing podcasts, and increased our offerings of community events. We've added blogs to our online mix, launched three 24x7 online audio streams, and the Gather.com social-networking site has embraced the public radio audience. Meanwhile we've seen increasing traffic to our online news, and our technical capacities have allowed us to make improvements in our production processes.

The redesign is an effort to accommodate these changes while attempting to improve access to our content and better reflect our full range of online services. This redesign affects only the MPR homepage and the news areas so far; you will see changes to the rest of the site in coming weeks.

These are the key changes you'll encounter:

• The MPR homepage has been merged with the News homepage. (The old News homepage has been eliminated).
• News topical categories are fewer in number and have been renamed; subcategories have also been added.
• Principal navigation to Radio, Events, and Online News—our major information blocks—are presented as tabs. Links to the radio services remain at the top of the page.
• Blogs have been given their own area of the page, and are displayed in order of most-recently-posted-to-first.
• You'll find MPR-maintained Gather discussion groups listed on the homepage with notices of recent posts.
• The questions our newsroom is seeking your knowledge about through Public Insight Journalism are on the homepage and the other news pages.
• A new footer provides navigational aids and links to explore further content.

Thanks for using MPR.org! We hope you stay with us as we continue to evolve. If you have any thoughts about the redesign or our Web service, we'd love to hear them. Please forward them to us on our contact page.