Bi-weekly, a news update on Arriva North East, Go North East and Stagecoach North East will be provided - containing all fleet and network updates. Working alongside our fleet lists, we anticipate to update our fleet lists when updates occur and summarise these in a report at the end of the fortnight.
The long awaited release of North East Buses' fleet news section (shortened 'NEB News' for all of you cool kids out there!) has come! The section has seen massive updates occur within the last month, changing our plans from a forum-style update to a new page completely - with opportunities to view all news on one page in an organised fashion and also with opportunities to filter by operator which news you read.
I must take this opportunity to also point out that the news section is indeed still a "work in progress", but has been released publicly to allow for feedback. Because of this, you will continue to see minor cosmetic changes occur to the news section over the course of the next few days, until we think it's fully complete.
When originally designing the news section, our primary concern was to replicate what was already available on the market and improve where we believed areas could be improved. Like all other websites that provide a news section, we intended on focusing directly on fleet news. It soon became apparent to us that we needed to be different, and it was because of this, we decided to include general news items also.
After much discussion, we decided that it was not possible to achieve all that we had proposed on a forum post as we had originally planned. As such, we worked from scratch on the new, revised project - making individual pages to accompany our fleet list section, with this news on them.
You will notice that the news section appears to be split in two. One side holds news with headlines and bigger images, and the other side holds news with smaller images and no headlines. This is what we wanted. We wanted users to be able to distinguish between "big news" and "small news".
The big news (an example is shown in the screenshot below) should be the part of the news that everyone will want to read.
The small news (an example is again shown in the screenshot below) is news that perhaps isn't as noteworthy ('minor' network changes etc) as other events that have occurred in the fortnightly period.
Above I mentioned you could filter the results you see. This can be achieved by clicking the operator's button at the top of the page. If you want to see every news article for that fortnight, fair enough. If you don't and would prefer to see news from Stagecoach only - you click the Stagecoach button!
I associate our news section with a real life newspaper. There are some people who will sit and read through every news article, but the fair majority of people want to have a "quick fix" with something that interests them, and they do this by scanning for words/photographs of interest to them.
It is a little harder to achieve that sort of concept on a website, but filtering results was the way forward!
In the future (before the next update), we will update the news page to include an archive. This will hold all previous articles from a specific date (i.e. today's update will be archived as 25/08/13). The styling and general coding of this page is still a "work in progress" and is certainly not ready to be released just yet. When it is, I'll be sure to give you all a link to it
We'd like to know your opinions on the news section.
Do you like the styling of the page? One of our ideas was to have the news linked to the operator's colour, and you can see how we have achieved this on the news page. We're not sure if it's perfect, but we're also out of ideas on how it could be improved if we were to keep it.
Do you like the ordering of the page? All stories are grouped together on the main page by operator, which is also in alphabetical order (ANE, GNE and then SNE). One of our ideas was to have a jumbled up news section, with news from each operator being provided at various parts of the page. At present, Stagecoach will never appear at the top of the main page - that is the problem with ordering them as we have presently. Alternatives, anyone?!
If you have any other comments/suggestions, they'd be greatly appreciated - you can post them below.
Cheers everyone, and I hope you enjoy the news section!