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When you visited the Mountain View Voice’s website today, you may have noticed that things look a little bit different. We have rolled out a new home page design, with the goal of making it easier for our audience to find and read our articles.
This change has been months in the making and was undertaken in direct response to feedback from readers about our previous page design.
Perhaps most obviously, you’ll now see far more articles when you open our website from a desktop computer. Depending on your screen size, you can now see up to eight stories at once, rather than the three or four that were generally visible on our previous page.
We achieved this by switching from a two-column to three-column layout, including a right-hand column that doesn’t include photos. The goal is for you to be able to quickly get a comprehensive sense of the most important news happening in your community.
The additional story spots will also give our editors space to highlight a greater variety of articles, including our popular food, real estate and entertainment content.
If you’re checking us out on a cellphone, the design likely looks more similar to what you’re used to seeing. That’s because most of the presentation issues we heard about from readers were in relation to our desktop design. On a cellphone, you’ll continue to be able to scroll through our stories in a single, mobile-friendly column.
The changes to our home page don’t stop with the top section. We’ve also added more content to the home page, so you don’t have to sort through other pages on our site to find recent stories.
Readers previously reported that news stories often scrolled off our home page too quickly, making it hard to find an article from a day or two ago. To address that, we’ve now added a “More Local News” section where you’ll find recent news coverage that is no longer at the top of the page.
We’ve also significantly expanded the space on our home page for our lifestyles coverage. There are now separate sections for food, arts & culture and real estate coverage, each with space for three articles. We’ve also given more prominence to The Six Fifty, which is our publication covering culture and events throughout Silicon Valley.
One entirely new feature is our “Did You Miss” section, which will highlight some of our best work. In addition to the day-to-day news coverage that keeps our reporters busy, we also make a point as an organization to carve out time for in-depth reporting projects. This new section will make it easier for readers to peruse these stories.
As with all of our work, we always want to hear feedback from readers. If you’d like to share your thoughts on the new home page, or suggest additional changes to our website, contact me at zmorgan@embarcaderomedia.org.
Zoe Morgan helps to lead audience engagement efforts for Embarcadero Media Foundation, the Voice’s parent organization.
The site looks nice. Good job on the refresh.
Also, thanks for keeping RSS active for articles. It’s really convenient to have RSS from MV Voice for Articles. In contrast, the Palo Alto Online has not had RSS for its articles since March, 2025. In this regard, MV Voice is a step ahead.
One kind request: can RSS for comments be please reinstated as part of this website refresh? RSS for comments was removed from MV Voice in April of 2024, which was 15 months ago at the time of this writing.
RSS really is a truly excellent (convenient and efficient) standard way to stay up to date on updating contents such as news and comments on news items. It does not make sense to keep re-visiting a site just to check for updates by hand–that is to much. RSS solves this problem very gracefully. Techies (like in Mountain View) should know this and use it!
If comment RSS is for subscribers only, the MV voice could provide user/credential based RSS access–do paid accounts have that feature at least? Thanks for considering it.
Again, looking great. Thanks for the great online paper.
RSS for posts should be available on our all our sites at the same URL (domain/feed/). This was an issue early on, but we pointed it out to our vendor and they got them working across all sites. The old pre-January 2024 links, however, don’t work anymore.
Unfortunately, RSS for comments are not available from our sites. According to our vendor, when I’ve asked about this before, it has to do with the paywall when we activated it shortly after the original launch. It’s also not being able to turn it on for even credentialed users.
I’ve pushed on this as hard as I can, but it’s a limitation to their platform.
Sorry!
Looks great! Congratulations to the team.
Thanks for the thoughtful and informative reply, and for all your efforts on the upgrades.
Removing and re-adding Palo Alto Online did enable article RSS feeds to work again, great! Thanks very much for pointing that out!
On comment RSS feed not being possible: please get a new vendor, or push back on that more. It’s totally possible, with or without paywall. I have done it myself both ways. We are in silicon valley. There is no excuse for that one on technical grounds.
The site worked better before the technical upgrades (platform then facelift), because it allowed community engagement through convenient consumption of updating community comments. Now that’s not possible. I urge you to please point to this comment as feedback from the readership that it seems silly to not restore comment RSS feeds in some capacity, and that, yes, it is possible.
Maybe Pichai or Zuck could kick in a few bucks if budget is needed for that particular website vendor — they had big budgets for supporting local journalism, right?
You can do it!