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What's up with those gray photo boxes on the website?
Changing websites leads to differences in how things appear
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In changing our website from the old 1UP platform to the new Anvil platform, we couldn't go back and change history. This means when it comes to looking up older stories, you'll see a lot of gray boxes that are published with the stories.

Our Anvil platform requires an image to be published with each article. If the article doesn't have an image, a grayish-blue box pops up where an image should be.

In the many years the Monroe Times has run a website, we didn't always have a photo that accompanied the story or online post. When looking up or seeing articles published prior to July of 2018, readers will see gray boxes with many articles.

If we were to fix that, we would have to go through the history of all the things we published in the past and add a photograph. It would be an epic task that would take one person probably a year to complete. So, we have no way to really go back and rewrite the history of how things were published on former web platforms.

If you're seeing an older story, unless it was published at the time with photos, the box will appear.

Over time, as we add more and more new content to Anvil, these boxes will be less prevalent. Our journalists have been working hard for the last two months updating both the 1UP site and the Anvil site. We're going to beta with Anvil in August.

Of all the things to be concerned about -- people having to log into the new website, ensuring we're doing things right behind the scenes and making sure our readers like what they're getting -- the grayish-blue box seems like a small thing. Still it was worth an explanation. We firmly believe that immediately people will see an improvement in the speed and presentation of news with Anvil. There will be more advertising on Anvil, but that's because we as a business need advertising to be successful. Also, advertising is readable, engaging content.

We'll continually have more information coming to the public on the new features of our website and why things look the way they do. Feel free to give me a call at the Times office with your feedback. Ask for Matt Johnson at 608-328-4202.