You may notice some changes to the City Paper website today, most notably the removal of the events/restaurants/movies search widget on the right hand side of the page. We’ve been debating this change for a while now and looking at the usage stats, and we decided that the widget was doing more to create visual clutter on unrelated pages than to provide good search functionality. We’ve also removed a few other pieces that were cluttering up the page.

The goal is to create more focused sections. You can search for restaurants under eats, movies under movies, music under music, and theater under theater.

It’s an open secret that our website is in dire need of design improvements. Ever notice how this page actually has two search boxes? The one directly beneath the top navigation goes to a full site search powered by Google, while the search box under the City Desk header searches only City Desk posts. That’s because we use two different content management systems (Wordpress MU for blogs and an in-house system for our print-centric content) which haven’t been integrated. We don’t consider this an ideal solution, and we’re working on a more sensible search page.

We’re always open to suggestions and criticisms of how the site looks and works. Feel free to comment here or contact me directly at wamitchell@washingtoncitypaper.com.