One week later, and we think it’s safe to call the new redesign a winner with nothing but good vibes coming from all of you. Thanks! That being said we have made two note-worthy changes:

314-669-KTTY

We have a new “tip line” phone number: 314-669-K-T-T-Y We still have the contact form, but if you’d rather you can text or leave a message any tips or questions to that number. Like if you were out one night and saw Rams quarterback Sam Bradford hitting on your girlfriend you’d take a picture, text it to us at 314-669-KTTY and then step in and say “You can have her for 500,000k.” He’s got the money and  you both know it’s not working.

A better way to catch up on stories you missed

One popular request has been to add next and previous story links on the pages so you can flip through the ones you missed without having to go back to the homepage. As of right now, this feature is now live at the bottom of every post page, just above the comments.

Thanks again for enjoying the site and it’s new redesign!

Punching Kitty has been around, bringing St. Louis news to your lookin’ balls, for over three years now. (Technically our birthday was on Saturday, the 14th, but today’s good enough for us.) As with previous years, here’s the numbers:

• 3 years
• 1,648 articles
• 2,422 different “tags”
• Well over a million visitors.
• 4, maybe 5, bastard groupie kids

That’s a pretty great run so far, and while this last year was particularly challenging with all the travel we had to do for the “day job”, we’re excited to keep going for a little while longer. While we’re here, blabbing about ourselves, we should answer the top three most  common questions we get about the site:

Q: Why the name Punching Kitty? 

A: It’s funny sounding, and the last thing we wanted to do was to have some lame reference to St. Louis or the area in our name like “river”, “arch”, or “lou”.

Q: Are you going to do a podccast?

A: I would only move to doing a different medium (read: something other than writing) if I 100% knew I could do it just the way I envision it and in a way that wouldn’t take away from the site.

Q: How long are you going to do Punching Kitty?

Until I, or the majority of you all, get bored with it. Whichever comes first.

In other, semi-related and already obvious news, we are also relaunching the site with a new design today. Punching Kitty, from the very beginning, has believed in a design that is clean, uses easy to read dark text on a white background, has big photos, and have our name super huge on the top of every page. This design is an amplification of all of those ideals. Here are the highlights:

Categories

You should notice a dramatic simplification of our categories. We now have only 6: “Happening” (Current, generic news), “Media” (internet, local news, etc), “Crime” (duh), “Sports” (duh), “Going Out” (local shows, events, etc) and “Politics” (All capitalism and political stuff). They are all prominently linked in the header, and this should make the categories far more useful and function as subsections of the site going forward.

New Tip Form

The tip form has been redesigned and along with allowing more information as well as an extra photo (you can now attach up to 4), it also allows for a clear way to contact for things like the site being broken or corrections.

Featured Posts

The selected featured posts are now headlines at the top of the home page. Looks cleaner and less images for you to download.

Advertisements

There is far less advertisements on the site with this new redesign and that’s not be accident. We really wanted the content to be the focus, and since the goal here is to entertain and inform rather than get rich, it made a lot of sense to minimize them down to the two units on the right. Our hope is that we can soon fill these slots with some quality ads for local businesses or universal products.

Comments

We’re all in with Facebook comments. While the over-all number of comments per day is down, they seem to be of higher quality and less shit-disturbing than previously so they’re here to stay. You can now see a link to the comments right there on the home page for each post.

Internet Explorer 6

We’re not even sure why we have this here because if you’re using the browser version of that crust that forms in the corner of old people’s mouths then you can’t see this, but just for completeness sake: We no longer support IE 6. The 36 of you that came using that browser in the last month need to figure that shit out for yourselves.

More to Come

We’re still working on it and refining it as we go along, so please if you see anything broken or just a suggestion let us know via the contact form.

St. Louis’ #1 website, STLToday.com, finally launched a much needed redesign the other day. Our sources say its been in the works for some time and has been in a beta test for a few weeks before finally getting released to the general public the other day. We may have gotten a peak somehow and might have been using it for a little while now…or not…maybe…just sayin’.

So what do we think?

Quick version: It’s better.

Long version: First off, its faster, and that’s a welcome feature in of itself. We don’t want to know how much time of our life was wasted waiting for that big annoying photo rotator to load on the sports page. The other big improvement is the look of the single story page. Much cleaner look and, once again, loads much faster than before. We love the tabs interface where you have the story on the page, and you can click the tabs to see any photo galleries, videos or comments for this story…in fact we like it so much, we designed and created it on ToastedRav.com two years ago, but that’s cool, just glad to see STLToday suck a little less.

Not everything is cherries and hand-jobs out there in STLToday.com land though. We totally appreciate the effort to clean up the main sections, its not quite there. First off, this header is horrible. The ads are way too big still and the way its designed people will just ignore everything above the header and the ads will do no good to the struggling paper.

Going farther down the page, some sections look like ghost towns with nothing going on below the fold while others have way too much going on. We don’t need 18 stories on the front page about the Blues during their off-season…especially since four of those articles share the exact same title!

The last big problem we see is the fact that they are still pumping up Deb Peterson! What the hell? She hasn’t written a single interesting thing for years, and is constantly beat to the punch by bloggers and the Riverfront Times with nary a mention from Peterson. We don’t always agree with Burwell, but having her sitting there next to three 100% legitimate columnists is a joke.

Score: B -/C+ It’s a lot better, but this is where it should have been 3 years ago and still clinging to some “old media” ways. Catching up to the web is hard work. Good luck.

Yes.

We redesigned!  A little facelift for our second year in business, but more importantly a major backend overhaul that should allow us to keep things fresh and interesting for your lookin’ balls which you will see as we go along.

So…what do you think?  …I mean not that we care or anything…but well…we’ve always had a crush on you.

That is what is standing in on KMOX.com.  People are talking about it (shockingly) I’ll give them that, but to us this looks like the site was supposed to be up by now, so they put a splash screen up to buy some time.

No, it has nothing to do with the actual on-air station product.  Its just a website relaunch.

Don’t get us wrong, we are as excited as one can be over the relaunch of St. Louis’ #1 talk radio station’s website, but really only because it happened to be the worst web site of any major media source we have ever seen, so you can really only go up right?

Here’s how it used to look:

Yikes right?

We can’t wait to see it!

Photo critique borrowed from our parent site Hell Yeah Bitch! .com

The recently redesigned and relaunched website for St. Louis’ Fox affiliate on channel 2 just went live with a new domain: fox2now.com.  Abandoning the fairly recent Fox-wide “MyFox[insert city abbreviation].com” push already is a bit of a mystery to most, but the issue is fairly clear after a quick twitter search:

Even less of a mystery is what the “in” style for the front page of St. Louis big media websites.  There’s no doubt “Big Photo on Left with Recent Stories on Right with Ads Even Farther Right” is the new “side ponytail with leg warmers and fingerless lace gloves” in the STL media scene.  I’m just glad Fox decided to join the rest of them at the cool kids table:

I’m not going to “review” it now for many reasons, #1 of which is “Who gives a shit?” but I will drop this on you…Why for fucks sake why do some web people cling to “www”?!  The new Fox site even goes as far as to add it when you just type in “fox2now.com!”  The www is antiquated and just leads to confusion when you start to introduce subdomains like “foobar.fox2now.com”  Don’t believe me?  Ask your mom to go to “foobar.fox2now.com” and see if she tries to put the damn “www” before it, which won’t work.

Ok, enough geek talk.  What do you think?