The Frontenac News’ Website is Getting a Fresh Coat of Paint

Jesse Mills | Mar 27, 2019

We’ve redesigned our website, and before it goes live, we want to know what you think. You can preview the new design at new.frontenacnews.ca and give us feedback on it at This email address is being protected from spambots. You need JavaScript enabled to view it..

So why are we redesigning our website? There are a few reasons.

The first is speed. Many of us in the more rural parts of Frontenac have poor internet connections, so it is important to the Frontenac News that the site loads quickly. We’ve reduced the total size of the site to under 20% of what it is now, which should translate to some much quicker load times.

Closely tied to speed is accessibility. Just like how a slow website excludes users with poor internet connections, an inaccessible website excludes users with visual/other impairments. Since a large portion of our readership is made up of seniors, we made sure to focus a lot on this.

Most of our work won’t be noticeable to anyone not using a screen reader, but one big change is that the text size has been increased across the site. We hope that this change makes the site more legible for all of our users.

Finally, as you might have guessed, we have focused on making the website profitable. The online advertising landscape was not built with the small regional publication in mind, and so over the years the website has only ever cost us money. We’ve decided that in order for it to be sustainable, we needed to rethink our strategy.

On our redesigned website, you will only ever see ads for local businesses. No ads will include user tracking or scripts of any kind, and they will all be safe to click. We’ve also gone to great lengths to place them tastefully. This community and privacy-focused approach might not be too common in digital advertising, but we believe there’s value in it.

We hope that this redesign will be a win for everybody, but we know there’s always room for improvement. Check it out and let us know what you think!