mattwie.be archives

It was supposed to be different. And it is. It was supposed to celebrate the Prairies in a way that hadn’t been done before. And it does.

…[A]d sales lagged, and writers unable to sustain a career in writing or journalism on the promise of payment sometime in the future began finding new, paid work. The site began to slow down… and for some readers using certain hardware it didn’t work at all. Expert coding needed to happen and immediately. It didn’t, and the site spent a few months limping along, unable to display ads, barely able to display stories.

That’s Toban Dyck, the Spectator Tribune’s founder, and editor-in-chief, in What once was old is new again about the re-launch of their prairie-focused site. Toban’s also an old friend who got in touch at the end of 2014, looking for advice on how to solve his site’s woes.

The site had been built by some folks he knew back when he lived in the Toronto area. It had been largely pro-bono and, as time passed, the site became less of a priority for them to the point of complete abandonment, falling into the disrepair described above.

It used to be that this guaranteed to be a fatal scenario. An underfunded publication can’t get its developers to fix its ailing site, so it just fades away into the ether. Since they’re the only ones who know how the damn thing works, you’d have to hire an expensive expert (that you can’t afford) to salvage your content and migrate to a (hopefully more open) system.

But, thankfully, the site was built on WordPress, the open source publishing platform chosen by 24% of the web. The only hard thing about finding a WordPress expert is deciding which one to work with. Just change the theme, change some plugins, and maybe change the web host,¹ and you’ve got yourself a whole new site with all your old content.

I wasn’t able to be involved personally, but I did help Toban connect with a local WordPress developer, Ryan Santschi.² He didn’t need to be local, but local was right for a locally-focused publication.

Our ad sales will now have a local focus, our writers, some who have stayed with us and others who have lay dormant until things smoothed out, are ready to contribute excellent content, and some of the features the site was exciting about at its conception, like events, videos, and its daily ticker, will now work and be able to adapt, thanks to an in-house web developer.

The new site looks great, loads in a heartbeat, and works well on a variety of devices. I really hope that this is the first step back towards the promise that the Spectator Trib showed in its early days. I’m glad that WordPress helped to give them their second shot.