Improved ICN support for US & Canada

Back in April 2017, we redesigned the ICN website to better support increasing usage of smart phones and tablets, where 60% of our audience now view our website from a mobile device (up from 45% back in April 2017).

Now moving into 2019 we've been looking into other demographics, and one that stood out was that although ICN is based in the UK, our users come from all over the world, so we've recently made improvements for our overseas viewers.

Improved speed

As we're UK - based, as you get further from the UK our website tended to get slower, where in some locations it took 5-10 seconds to load, or sometimes just didn't load at all.

We've recently made changes to resolve this. Now if you're based in Europe our website is around 30% faster on average, and further afield in North America, Africa, Asia and Australia it's as much as 75% faster.

Hopefully this will make it easier to view our content, and allow you to share ICN with friends around the world. We'll continue working to make ICN faster throughout 2019.

Category changes

We have quite a significant viewership in North America, so we've decided to add a new category titled 'US & Canada'. Similar to our 'UK & Ireland' category, this will have news relevant to these two countries. We've populated it with a range of relevant articles so you can try it out straight away: www.indcatholicnews.com/news/us-canada

Also note that our 'Reflections & Homilies' category was recently moved from our header to our sidebar. This is visible by default on desktop, and on a mobile device you can open this menu by clicking the orange button on the left with three horizontal lines on it.

That's it for this update, we hope these changes improve your experience on ICN, and wish you all the best going into 2019. If you have any questions or concerns, feel free to contact us using the 'Contact' tab in the website header.

- ICN Development Team