Check out our new website format

By Jane Alford/Carolina Gateway Editor

If you haven’t visited the Carolina Gateway website, www.carolinagatewayonline.com, in the last few weeks, you are in for a surprise.
We’ve recently undergone a major format facelift and added several new bells and whistles to it. The new site was rolled out Dec. 11.
The best thing about the new format is that it offers you more ways to communicate with us.
You can post your pet’s photo in our new Pet of the Week, which is a reader-generated feature. When you click on “more” in the Pet of the Week bar, you’ll find Adopt-a-Pet, which will showcase a local animal in foster care or at the animal shelter.
You can also read local bloggers, such as our new reporter, Reece Murphy, who’s writing the New Guy on the Blog. He’d like to hear from you.
And if you’d like to be one of our bloggers, just contact me. I’m now in the blogger-recruiting business.
One of the things I like most about the updated site is you can see a lot more of the stories posted right on the home page.
The site also brings back the PDFs of each page of the physical paper, sort of a throwback to our very first website.
The new-and-improved site allows you to submit letters to the editor and birth, engagement and wedding announcements; post community events on the event calendar; and submit news items, news tips and sports results.
As on our old site, you can still post comments on stories and participate in online forums and polls, so please do.
It also includes a number of community links to organizations and groups throughout Indian Land and the county. If you would like your organization’s link included, please let me know.
The new site lets us publish a lot more photos, slide shows, videos and other info than we could ever get in the paper.
Eventually, we hope to expand our offerings to include short videos of news events and offer an online scrapbook of  reader-submitted photos and videos.
I encourage you to register on the new site and bookmark its address, because it will enable you to get your news before you even get your paper.
And let me know what you think of the new site. Really, go ahead and tell me; I have very thick skin.
Send your comments and suggestions to cgnews@the-lancasternews.com.