KINGSPORT — The Kingsport Times News will soon receive a website facelift.
The Times News is set to launch its new website on Thursday with a revamped site designed to provide a smoother and simplified user experience.
“Though our sites were still relatively young as far as websites go, we knew there were better, more user-friendly designs available now,” Times News Publisher Rick Thomason said in an email. “As we embarked on launching bristolnow.news, we got a good look at available new designs and knew it was time to offer our readers a more user-friendly, easier-to-navigate experience.”
Six Rivers Media is the parent company of the Kingsport Times News and Bristol Now, its newest online and weekly print product, which launched last month.
For the Times News website, the redesign includes a more focused menu for online readers.
“I think navigation and presentation are the prominent improvements on the sites,” Thomason said. “The look itself will be starkly different than what our readers have experienced in recent years. But beyond that, we’ve even slimmed down the menu and gotten rid of some unused categories to make finding information easier.”
The Kingsport and Bristol news organizations aren’t the only ones receiving a newly designed online presence, though.
On Thursday, Six Rivers Media will also launch a new website for its other daily news organization, the Johnson City Press.
The company’s other weekly news organizations — the Jonesborough Herald & Tribune, the Erwin Record and the Mountain City Tomahawk — will also receive a website redesign in the coming months.
“While they will all be on the same basic template,” Thomason explained, “each will have its own color scheme that distinguishes it from the others. The overall goal is to showcase our local journalism in ways that make it easy to find and easy to access.
“Six Rivers Media is the largest news gathering operation in the Appalachian Highlands, and we want our website visitors to have the best access to the amazing work our journalists churn out every day.”
The website URLs will remain the same for the Kingsport Times News and the Johnson City Press.
For more information, email [email protected].
