Newscom FocalPoint Your guide to the best content from Newscom

*Update 4/21: The new site is now live. The links in this post and related posts have been updated to link to the new site and not the beta site.

Starting today,  we’re doing a soft rollout of the new Newscom site. You can access the new site here, or you can get to it from the home page of the current Newscom site. We call it a “soft” rollout because you can still use both sites at your discretion, but eventually we will be moving entirely to the new site, so you might as well start trying it on for size.

Ok, the big secret about the new release is that not much has changed. Really. Well, a lot has changed, but it won’t affect how you use the Newscom site much. We basically rewrote the code for the entire site. It was a huge project and you should read more about what we did and why we did it.

But as far as the day-to-day use of the site, there isn’t much that’s different. You can read about the changes and how each of the major ones will affect your job:

1. Front page. When new users would stumble on the old Newscom site, they didn’t know what Newscom did or how to use it. We’ve updated the front page to include easy access to links people care about, and to make it more informative for people who don’t know what Newscom does.
2. Search. We have a nifty search box that pops up when you start a search. You can ignore it and get the same results you’ve always gotten on your Newscom searches, or you can use some of the cool new tools like “relevance” ranking to make your image search faster. We highlight some of the tools and tricks with this post.
3. Open site. Search before you log in. It’s pretty self-explanatory, but it’s probably a good thing to read about the pros and cons of logging in. Plus, you can check out the product before you buy in, which leads to the next major change of:
4. Self-registration process. The way Newscom is currently set up, you could try to register, but you would only see the free content and we wouldn’t tell you it was only a very limited selection of images. Now you can set up your own account and get access to images you can use, right when you need them.
5. New code. Welcome to the world of java. Our changes to the code aren’t very exciting (unless you like java and that sort of coding stuff) but they’re very important and the main reason we made the switch.

Do you have any questions about new features or how to use the new site? Leave us a comment or get in contact with us and we’ll help you right out.

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