The Current

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Beta-Test The Current's new website

November 29, 2012

Mobile view
The Current Beta site on a iPhone.
MPR Graphic

There are a lot of great ways to experience The Current, and we've been spending the last three months working on a new site to make the online experience the best it can be.

It's not quite ready, but we're at a crucial point: we need you, our audience, to help ensure a terrific product when we cut-over to the new website in January.

The primary goal for the new site was to make our digital offerings accessible on any operating system, any device, especially smart phones and tablets. Using a technique called Responsive Web Design, our designer and developers created a fluid site whose layout will be tailored to your computer or smart phone.

We are also seeking to make the features you use on the website more accessible and user-friendly. By studying the analytics and doing focused user-testing, we found that the parts of the site that get used the most are the stream and the playlist. We hope you'll find these pages more easily, and have a better experience while you're there.

Our third goal was to better represent the additional content that is created for the website; for example in-studio performances, blog posts, slideshows and stories.

We've also made a ton of improvements -- too numerous to mention here -- to the back-end of how the site runs. We hope you'll notice better performance on the site too.

A note on the content: it's mostly the same. We are aware of a few pieces of content that still need to make the move over to the new site, but please, let us know if you are missing something. Also, Top 89 is not available on the beta site.

We'll be running the beta site for about a month. We're planning on cutting over to the full site in early January. Until then, we'll look for your feedback from the site. So whenever you see someting awry, please click the "Please share your feedback with us" link at the top of the site.

Thank you for your help!