Dear readers, we are thrilled to announce that The Ukrainian Weekly will launch a redesigned website on October 6, which marks the 88th anniversary of the newspaper’s founding.
The previous major update to the site was made roughly six years ago. An editorial in the June 14, 2015, issue of The Ukrainian Weekly informed readers that, while the web address remained the same, “the look and functionality [of the new site] are entirely different.”
The previous redesign was completed “thanks to the truly Herculean efforts of our webmaster and tech guru, Ihor Pylypchuk,” we wrote in the editorial six years ago. At that time, the new site included various improvements: it was developed to function not only on desktop and laptop computers, but across various mobile devices as well (smartphones, tablets, iPhones, iPads); all of the articles on the new site were presented as separate full-text stories that could be easily printed, with high-quality photos included; navigation was designed to be intuitive and related articles were categorized by topics.
Our editorial from six years ago also quoted Mr. Pylypchuk, who said that “we will be constantly improving [the] user experience” of the redesigned site.
In keeping with that promise, we are excited to report that we have made a number of additional improvements to our website. First, we redesigned the overall look and feel of the site, though we have retained certain design elements that worked well in the old site. Next, we’ve taken our first, small step into the multimedia world by launching a new podcast (we’ll tell you much more about that later, but for the time being we’ll leave that news as a teaser of things to come). And we’ve made various improvements on the back end of the site so that pages load faster and photos and graphics appear with more clarity and resolution.
Finally, we’ve integrated a new electronic payment option that will give people the ability to pay for any subscription – print, digital, both or a gift subscription – electronically and quickly. You’ll even be able to do it in under five minutes on a cell phone, and we’ll offer a QR code that, when scanned by a mobile device, will take you right to our newly redesigned subscriptions page. Moreover, the new system will give you the option to have your subscription renew automatically so that you don’t have to go through the trouble of resubscribing every year. And for those individuals who still love mailing in a check, fear not! We will gladly still accept checks.
In short, this is only the beginning. Our website will evolve and we will work to continuously improve your experience there. But we can’t make it better without your feedback, so once the redesigned site launches on October 6, we invite you to visit, spend some time there and let us know what you think by emailing us at [email protected]. And if you know people who aren’t subscribers, invite them to try out the new subscription portal. They can do so by going to www.ukrweekly.com and clicking on the red subscribe button once the new site launches on October 6.