Thanks for visiting the new Lyons Recorder web site. The site follows a few rules to organize its information. All of them are simple but maybe not obvious to the new reader. Let's start by covering the main navigation features. Here's a snapshot of the left side of the navigation area.
The black horizontal bar is the main menu. Its the primary means of getting around the site. Like all newspapers, our site is divided in to sections. Our sections are "News", "School", "Lifestyle" and "Recreation". When you click on any of the sections you'll see summary information for the most recent articles in the section.
In our snapshot, the "School" section has been clicked. This causes the yellow area to the let to appear. It list the categories of the "School" section. Clicking on "Elementary", restricts display to the most recent articles in the "School" section and "Elementary" category.
The "Home" button is similar to the front page of a newspaper. It shows the hottest stories. But its different from a newspaper because the hot stories will display on the "Home" page and within their respective sections.
Here's a snapshop of the right side of the navigation area.
On the right end of the menu bar is an icon that looks sort of like a bicycle gear. When clicked it shows the red submenu with more icons. This lets you change the way the site is display to better match the screen your using. The letter "A" icons change the size of the text. The square like icons change how much screen width the site uses. The default text size and layout is geared for those with screens 1024x768. This a common and minimalist screen size. Those with the new wide, LCD screens probably prefer one of wide layouts. Using a smaller text size may be better when reading on iPhones, netbooks and other mobile devices. And we hope the larger text size helps those with weaker vision.
Between the sections and the bicycle gear are the sites special features. Currently we have "Calendar", "Classified", "Subscriber Survey". These behave more like internet applications than a newspaper. A full description is beyond the scope of this orientation. Hopefully a few short words will suffice for now.
The "Classified" behaves much like Craigslist.com. There's no charge to post a classified. We believe Lyons is too small for the trouble makers on Craigslist to bother with. Its meant to be just for Lyons. Deal locally with the friends and neighbors.
The "Calendar" gathers schedule information from a variety of local organizations. It can be a good place for a realtor to advertise their open houses, a restaurant to advertise their specials or the PTO to coordinate their activities. See the Overview page under Calendars for more information.
Each of our sections will list a number of articles in a format similar to this image of the "Successful Spring Carniva" article. We're going to use it as an example. All our articles have similar features.
The red title, "Successful Spring Carnival", is a link. It will take you to the full text of the article. The "Read more" functions the same way. The text displayed is first paragraph or two of the article. The gray bar has some icons that do some nifty things.
The leftmost one with the red swoop is for Adobe Acrobat Reader. Clicking it will turn the article into a Acrobat(PDF) document. This is great way to save a special article. Acrobat(PDF) is a standardized format that will be useful long after this web site has moved on to other news.
The rightmost icon is a printer. Clicking it will popup a window with just the article in it and none of the ads or navigation. It prints much better.
If this help wasn't so helpful, if you find the web site difficult to use, please tell us. It will help us better serve your needs. Send email to This e-mail address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it