Welcome to your new-look Sussex Newspaper.
It’s taking months of hard work and countless sleepless nights to finally get this new look right. But, at last, The Sussex Newspaper – the most amazing online publication in Sussex – has been given a fantastic make-over.
Our goal was to make TSN more polished, intuitive, easy to navigate and (just as importantly) easy to submit articles to.
At the root of everything was the huge switch from the Jooomla platform to WordPress. If you’re not into computers, then those two words won’t mean a thing to you. To us, though, it was a huge leap of faith.
What is Joomla?
Joomla is a free open-source content management system (in short: CMS), for publishing content for the World Wide Web (in short: WWW). The programming language use to create Joomla! is PHP, and it uses object-oriented programming (in short: OOP). Translated from Swahili language Joomla! means “All together!”.
Joomla is one of the most popular free content management systems (CMS) in the world that allows you to easily create and manage a dynamic website. It has an intuitive management interface to control all the features and functionality this powerful CMS possesses. Furthermore, there are hundreds of free extensions written for Joomla that allows users to extend its functionality and customize it to their own objectives. Joomla Content Management System is supported by a large and friendly community where newbies could really rely on assistance from more experienced members. Joomla counted more than 30 million downloads in 2012.
What is WordPress?
WordPress started in 2003 with a single bit of code to enhance the typography of everyday writing and with fewer users than you can count on your fingers and toes. Since then it has grown to be the largest self-hosted blogging tool in the world, used on millions of sites and seen by tens of millions of people every day.
Everything related to WordPress is created by and for the community. WordPress is an Open Source project, which means there are hundreds of people all over the world working on it. (More than most commercial platforms.) It also means you are free to use it for anything from your cat’s home page to a Fortune 500 web site without paying anyone a license fee and a number of other important freedoms.
There are five main reasons why we decided to use WordPress for the new TSN website:
1. WordPress designs are based on “Themes”. Themes are composed of images and cascading style sheet (CSS) webpage layouts, and this makes it very easy for us to customize the look and feel of a WordPress site using a pre-existing Theme and a new page layout created in Photoshop (or a layout imported into Photoshop from a QuarkXPress PDF, an Acrobat PDF, InDesign PDF, etc.). On the low-end of the design scale, you can basically drop a company’s logo into the top corner of the page and you are good to go!
2. WordPress software allows anyone to create and edit new web pages and blog “posts” using only a web browser. No knowledge of HTML or other code is required. The WordPress editing interface is very easy to use. It works a lot like simple word-processing software. And, the site administrator can grant various levels of access to others, allowing them to contribute to the website/blog. Because the interface is web-based, creating and editing pages can be done from anywhere with an Internet connection.
3. The blogging features in WordPress allow you to update your website/blog frequently, to receive and respond to comments from your readers, and to allow others to subscribe to your site content using RSS. This is great for your human customers and potential customers. It is also great for search engines, because search engines love fresh content.
4. There are many more features of a WordPress website or blog that make it much, much better than a traditional “static”, “brochure-style” website (i.e., built once and never updated after that) when it comes to search engine optimization and social media. And many of these features are taken care of automatically, requiring little or no effort (or programming skill) on your part.
5. WordPress makes viewing TSN on your mobile a brilliant experience – try it now and you’ll see what we mean.
However, in order to make TSN as stylised and polished as possible, we needed a theme that would really do the county’s most popular online paper justice.
That’s where the great team at Themify came in.
They allowed us to use their amazing Magazine theme as the framework and design for our new paper. We took a long hard look at the theme and, after just a few minutes, we were hooked. We loved the theme and know you will as well. Using the drag and drop capability of the Themify Builder, the Magazine theme allowed us to build any kind of layouts quickly without any template editing. How amazing is that?
By using just our imagination we could build complex grid layouts like Guardian, CNN, MSN, BBC, etc. in minutes. Magazine is a responsive 3-column theme packed with many features and options: 42 pre-built layout options, mobile slide navigation, mega menus, widgetized areas for banner ads, Awesome icon font, breaking news ticker, social share buttons, related posts, footer menu, social links, and more
Impressed? We were. The Sussex Newspaper editor Kizzi Nkwocha said: “We are incredibly grateful to the people at Themify for helping us create what is an amazing WordPress-based newspaper. Their support and creativity was first class and they made what could have been a painful transition, a pleasurable and stress-free journey. We love the new Sussex Newspaper and I know our readers will as well.”
To find out more about Themify, click this link