by JEN BIUNDO

For decades, the Hays Free Press has been a pillar of the communities it serves. Those communities, like the rest of the world, are changing quickly but the Free Press intends to change with them to stay relevant and valuable to our readers — who we recognize are also viewers and listeners and as well.

We hope the new HaysFreePress.com which launches this takes us a long way in that direction.

Above all, we want the changes to make HaysFreePress.com easier to navigate, search and use while keeping a traditional look and feel appropriate for an institution like the Hays Free Press.

The site is also integrated with Facebook and Twitter. We realize these social networking and short-message services are a cue to roll eyes for many of our audience and their extreme popularity may yet prove to be a fad. But for tens of thousands of people in our coverage area, Facebook and Twitter are an important part of how people live, keep in touch with each other and find out what is going on — in short, roles newspapers have traditionally played.

The Web site is a work in progress. For example, our full archives of stories going back several years won’t be available for a while. In the meantime and beyond, we want you to feel free to tell us what you like and don’t like either by e-mailing jen@haysfreepress.com or commenting directly in the story below.

There is a lot adjusting and tweaking to do before we can say the site is complete. Of course, the site will never fully be complete because people more and more expect to get their news faster and faster. We intend to deliver that, making the adjustment from newsgathering focused almost exclusively on a weekly print paper to one that also gives priority to daily updates.

We think it will be an adjustment but with guidance and input from our readers, we expect to get there and expect it to be worth it when we do.