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Say hello to Tampabay.com

One site will organize content from the St. Petersburg Times and its affiliate publications. New features will include customized traffic advisories.

By KEVIN McGEEVER
Published March 3, 2006

	[Times photo]

On Monday, your experience on our site will be very different.

Instead of landing on this news front page, you'll arrive on Tampabay.com. The site will still link to sptimes.com and act as a front door into the websites of our now-daily free newspaper tbt*, It's Your Times, Floridatrend.com, as well as selected content from our politics and government publications Congressional Quarterly and Governing.

Tampabay.com will organize itself by topics of interests instead of newspaper sections. We're calling them "channels" and they are: News, Sports, Money, Entertainment, Living, Politics, Community and Marketplace.

The site also will provide:

-- Regularly updated traffic reports that users can customize according to their own commutes;

-- Searchable databases for classified advertising (jobs, homes, cars) and weekend planning (movies, restaurants, events); and

-- A tool to search the Tampabay.com sites or the Web.

Christine Montgomery, the Times' director of electronic publishing, answered questions about the new site.

Q. Why Tampabay.com?

A. Tampabay.com better describes who we are than sptimes.com. We're not only the newspaper online. We publish news and information around the clock, we use stories from our affiliate publications such as tbt*/Tampa Bay Times, Florida Trend for business and Congressional Quarterly and Governing for politics.

We also have a growing stable of original content - such as blogs, podcasts and reader-contributed stories and letters - as well as expanded information from the paper such as stocks, weather, traffic reports, more entertainment listings, show times.

We think it will be easier to come to one destination - tampabay.com - to dig into all the things we have to offer. It's why we're calling it a local portal instead of a newspaper website.

Q. What's a portal?

A. A website that serves as an entryway into a wide range of resources. Yahoo is a portal. MSN.com is a portal. Our portal, tampabay.com, will link to a range of resources for people living in Tampa Bay. (Or people with an interest in the area.) We have news 24-7, but also weather and traffic reports, shopping tools and information, entertainment offerings, real estate listings, jobs in the market, useful links . . . tons of stuff.

Q. What's a channel?

A. A channel is an area on our site where a user can find all the information we have on a particular topic. For example, Entertainment is a channel - a page with links to reviews and columns, show times at local theaters, movie trailers, a TV guide, a calendar of events, games such as Sudoku, blogs, and podcasts. Our other channels are News, Sports, Money, Politics, Community, Living and Marketplace.

Q. Okay, I've bookmarked www.sptimes.com. Now I click and this new page is on my screen. Is sptimes.com gone forever? And tell me why I shouldn't be angry.

A. You can still get to sptimes.com by clicking on the St. Petersburg Times name at the top of tampabay.com. True, it's an extra click, and that can be frustrating. But if you think of tampabay.com as we do - as a new homepage for sptimes.com - nothing changes but the URL, or web address. That, and you'll have quicker access to more content.

Q. Will there be news on tampabay.com?

A. Yes. Our editors will select a handful of stories to post on the front of tampabay.com. We'll also use that page to link you to much more news than we were serving on sptimes.com alone.

Q. What about Florida Trend, Congressional Quarterly and Governing? What am I going to learn from them?

A. Those are some of our affiliate publications, and they specialize in government and business reporting. We'll use some of the work from these publications to bring more depth and perspective to the content on our website.

[Last modified March 3, 2006, 14:36:35]