A FUN game I'm playing at the moment is challenging a couple of my Champion-reading mates to see if they can spot anything new with our website.

Even at Champion HQ we know that champnews, the paper's online sister, hasn't quite been looking its best over the past few months, so I've been asked to use what I've learned from the weird online world of blogging and tweeting to beaver away in the background and do my best to make it a website worth going on.

I'm the first to admit it's not the most polished product I've ever seen, but that doesn't mean I can't do what I can to make it better. Among the things I've been working on are:

1) Making sure the website is updated every day - including weekends - without fail. Too many people keep telling me they go straight to Southport GB when they go online for their local news, and while I make no secret of what I think of some of their stories, even I accept it is a rolling source of news items. News happens 24/7, not just on the Wednesday when the paper comes out.

2) Better promotion of blogs, including ones we at The Champion write and a selection of ones written by people across the region. Our original blogs page, to be honest, looked a mess and was badly out of date, but the much better replacement means you can read thought-provoking thought from all sorts of people in but a click.

3) More videos and Podcasts, including ones from outside organisations, like the local authorities and educational establishments like Edge Hill in Ormskirk. It means you can see and hear the news in a way that's (obviously) not possibly in the paper itself, and we're all for more of it.

4) A new contacts list. Do you know who our local reporter if you live in Formby, in Maghull, or in Ormskirk? You will when the new one's finished, and it'll be easy to get to if you're online.

5) More in the way of sports and reviews, because we know you like both. Watch this space.

6) Picture galleries, starting with one we did of the Ormskirk Christmas lights switch on last weekend. We take lots of pictures, so it'd be a shame not to share them with you.

7) More exclusive online-only content, like the Life On Cars motoring magazines I do occasionally. It's a common complaint that lots of papers are too small to squeeze the really big features in, but with the web, that's not a problem.

8) More plugs in The Champion newspaper, which still gets delivered to 140,000 homes nearly every week. What's more, if you do fire up the computer - and if you're reading this chances are you already have - you know everything with our name on it has been written by proper journalists, not shady online bloggers with stupid pseudonyms and a penchant for defamation and poor grammar.

So go on, give our website our go, and let us know if you like it. And if you don't, tell me why and I'm happy to see what I can do.

Trust me, I'm a journalist!

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