A new look on mobile for the Homicide Report

You'll notice a couple of changes to the Homicide Report today — a page with resources for families of homicide victims and new features on mobile phones.

First, the resources page, compiled by Times staff writer Jerome Campbell, is intended to help families dealing with the loss of a loved one. You can find it by clicking "Resources" in the top navigation. It contains a question-and-answer interview with Kathleen Cady, special assistant for the Los Angeles County Bureau of Victim Services; phone numbers for relevant government agencies; and contact information for support groups. Please email us with updates, comments or questions.

Second, we asked you this summer to help us identify changes that would improve the Homcide Report site. We knew one area that needed dramatic improvement was how readers browsed on mobile phones, which accounts for a substantial portion of our audience.

What was wrong? There was no way to change the search or filters on a phone, and the map took up too little area of the screen to be useful.

A screenshot of the new mobile search screen on the Homicide Report.

Today we're releasing a new interface for browsing, searching and viewing the map and blogroll on a phone.

Now, when loading the site on a phone, you'll get an option to search or filter the database or switch to a map view. Of course, you will still see the standard blog roll. We've also pre-loaded a few popular searches.

If you open the search tab, now you get the same options as on the desktop — searching by name or address, or filtering by neighborhood, race/ethnicity, gender, cause of death, year, age or officer involvement. You can view the results of any search on a map or list view.

As always, please feel free to let us know what you think about the changes by sending an email or leaving a note in the comments.

Contact the Homicide Report. And follow @latimeshomicide on Twitter.