ELi's Website Improved!

We are so excited to present to you ELi’s redesigned website! This upgraded design has been made possible through the generous support of ELi’s financial contributors during our successful early-summer Kickstarter campaign, and also through the talent, wisdom, patience, and hard work of our tech management team, Lisa Lees and Morgan Lees.

Our goals with this new layout have been to make the page clearer and easier to navigate, to bring more attention to content you may have wanted to see but missed, and to give you a one-stop microcosm to the macrocosm community that is East Lansing. (Sorry, Alice has been reading a history of the seventeenth century this summer.)

Here are some of the new features of the site:

• a clickable map of ELi’s reporting stories at the top of our front page! Click on a pin and it will open a bubble with a headline. Then click on the headline to go to the aritcle. The map doesn’t yet have all of our stories mapped, but notice how it provides a way for us to point you to our reporting about specific locations, contributing—as we always try to do—to the feeling that there is a there here. (Know of a past ELi story you want to have added to our map? Contact us.)
• “teasers” on the front page for each story, to help you understand what a story is about and why you might want to read it.
• a bright orange bar near the top of the front page encouraging you to sign up for our free emailed weekly news digest. Do sign up! It is a great way to make sure you didn’t miss anything you might have wanted to see in the last week, and a great way to know what’s coming up in East Lansing in the coming week. It’s also how we communicate emergency information to you during events like the Boil Water Advisory and post-storm power outages.
• better organized navigational options, including a list of stories that are “popular with our readers” and an “in case you missed it” list.
• more and better organized ELi information to help you understand and participate in this public service to the people of East Lansing.
• bios and photos of our hard-working reporters!

There are also a number of changes you can’t see but that help our decentralized team work behind the scenes to keep the site updated and stable.

Concurrent with all of this, we are offering today a new way to become a monthly supporter of ELi at the $5, $10, $20, or $50 rate, via Patreon. Monthly supporters help us have a stable, predictable source of income, meaning we can pull our attention away from fundraising to do what matters to you: reporting local news and information in an accurate, clear fashion.

Love the new site but not in a position right now to be a monthly supporter? As always, you can also send a one-time contribution by check or online using a credit card. We would really appreciate if you’d do that today as a way of showing Morgan and Lisa and the rest of the ELi team just how much you appreciate the new design and their service to you and your community.

Thanks for being an ELi reader!