In a little less than a month, July 13 to be exact, The Selma Times-Journal will debut its new Web site, selmatimesjournal.com, and a companion Web site, selmascene.com.

Our main Web site will look nothing like our readers currently experience. It will be much easier to navigate, much more interactive for our readers and, most importantly, much easier for our news staff to use. Expanding on the last point, our current Web format is difficult to post to in order to maximize what we offer our Web readers. It&8217;s sort of like going to Burger King and ordering a Whopper and not being able to hold the mayo.

Our new Web format is much, much different. There are multiple options in how and where we can post material, when we post material and how you, the reader, can digest that material. It will also give readers an opportunity to enter an online comment on specific news, sports and lifestyle stories [after the user properly registers] and even to comment on editorials and obituaries.

If we write a story about a commission or council meeting and you want to weigh in with your thoughts, you can do so by registering with a valid e-mail address, and your comment will show under the story with your &8220;screen name&8221; tag. If someone you know dies, you can write an online memorial to that person. If we write an editorial you think is bunk or that you agree with, you can say so.

What that all adds up to is a vehicle for us to give you more news, 24 hours-a-day. When something big happens, we don&8217;t have to turn on the press to get the news to our readers. We can post the basics of what happened, no matter the time of day [or night] and expand on the story in our next print edition.

We&8217;ve become an information driven society and in today&8217;s world, more than ever before, people want information as soon as it happens. With the new selmatimesjournal.com we&8217;ll be better positioned to meet that need.

Want to upload photos or video from your vacation? Selmascene.com will allow you to do so. That way Aunt May and Uncle Dave in Remlap can log on and view them, or you can share them with the other readers of selmascene.com. There will be photo galleries from our staff photographers for you to view, which will be really nice, since we have limited space to print 20 photos from a football game in the newspaper. But we can provide them online for you to view and you can also buy staff-generated photos

from the comfort of home through our partnership with an online vendor.

Each month selmatimesjournal.com has more than 90,000 unique visitors that log on to read stories about Selma and Dallas County and the people who live here. It&8217;s quite a virtual community, and I&8217;m confident we&8217;ll be welcoming a lot more folks to the neighborhood soon as we continually evolve our traditional and new media products.

Dennis Palmer is publisher of The Selma Times-Journal and selmatimesjournal.com. He can be reached at 410-1712, or by e-mail at

dennis.palmer@