Categorizing information is common for publications that include news and events, and websites are no exception. If you visit online newspapers or magazines or event calendars, you’ll often see that the sites are broken down into topics to make it more convenient to find information on a specific topic.

Kickers

Several years ago, the UMRA newsletter began using a device called a "kicker." If you’ve looked at the newsletter, you may have noticed these kickers, in smaller text, positioned above article headlines, as in the example on the left.

When building the new UMRA website, the web team agreed that incorporating kickers on the site would help readers to quickly identify the subject of an article or event. The advantage of using the kickers on the website is the ability to make them link to a collections of articles in that category.

On the UMRA website, when you see a kicker above an article or event title, you can click on it to see more articles or events related to the kicker subject, with the most current information appearing first.

Kickers on other sites

Many sites you may already be familiar with use kickers to link to categorized information on their sites, but perhaps you didn’t know you could click on those things to see all the content in a particular category.

Don’t be afraid to try to click on something that isn’t a different color of text or isn’t underlined. Many times sites will have something like a kicker above their headlines that is a link, but it may not look like a link. Hover over it to see if the cursor changes or click it to see if it is a link!

Typically sites with news or event articles employ a kicker above the headline in the way that we have on the UMRA site.

The Minneapolis Star Tribune online uses kickers above many of their headlines. Here’s an article on their site’s home page that has a kicker linking to the Sports page.

The Bring Me the News website also links to categories, such as MN Food & Drink, from some of their home page articles.

Filters

Once kickers were established on the new site, we were able to present them in a list on the News page, giving you the option to filter UMRA articles and events based on a specific category just by clicking on the category name. The image on the right shows just some of the filters found in the right column of the News page.

Clicking on “Book Club I,” for example, will bring you to a page that lists all the articles and events related to Book Club I, beginning with the most recent.

Filters on other news sites

Sites that are devoted to news or events will often have a list of topics or sections that can help you narrow your focus. For the UMRA site, we chose to put our categories in a list on the News page. The following examples show how a few other sites display their categories.

If you look at the Sports section on the Star Tribune site (or any main category on the site’s menu), you’ll see a list of various sports categories. All main categories on the site's menu have these subcategory filters.

Minnesota Public Radio stories include a list of their news sections on the left side of the page.

Coming up next

In our next article, we’ll focus on the new annual calendar on the UMRA site.

Questions?

We want to hear from you! Do you have a general technology question? Or have you run across something on the UMRA site that confused you or didn’t work the way you expected? Let us know and if the answer to your query would be beneficial to the membership, we’ll write an article about it.

Important note: The website does not currently render properly on small screens such as phones, iPads, Kindles or small tablets. We’re still working to make the site responsive. A responsive website is one that has been built to adjust the screen presentation to look good on all screen sizes. It takes time and lots of coding in the background to make this work. We're working to make the site fully responsive. For now it's best viewed on a full size monitor, instead of smaller devices.