A beautiful commute

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Usually Monday morning commutes are no fun. Basically it means a long drive to go to work to face all the things that you were able to push aside for the weekend. Then the long trip back, exhausted from the days work. However, nature made today’s commute a little more bearable. It’s days like this, that I appreciate the area I live in. Most days, it’s grey and raining. Which, I guess, makes days like this all that more special.

Four websites down, five to go

With three websites already launched on a new CMS platform, last Thursday (Nov. 4) marked the fourth. And number four was The Blue Mountain Ealge located in John Day, Oregon.

The platform is with TownNews, and so far, so good. We have five websites left to redesign and launch. Our Daily Astorian site is next in line at the end of next week. This will mark the final daily, with only weeklies left to do.

The interactivity should increase greatly on the sites from our old platform and we are surging ahead into the current century by finally having mobile sites. The sites will play up the great multimedia that our company produces and should engage our community on a higher level.

But, like with any new site, we are having our share of glitches and so far the Eagle community is embracing the new site.

Trifecta = headache when launching new websites

They say things come in threes. Don’t know if that is necessarily a good thing. In this case, it may be a blessing in disguise or a headache of great proportion. I tend to lean towards the later.

Launching a redesign of a website on a new Content Management System (CMS) is an enormous task in itself. Taking on two of them will nearly drive you insane. We went for the trifecta last week. Not only did we launch three websites in the matter of four days, but two of them were on the same day.

I now plead insanity. Temporary at the minimum.

The biggest lesson? We are taking a new approach for the remaining five sites that we have and working solely on one at a time. The biggest relief? Three sites are launched. Minus the tweaking, fixing the glitches and swimming in the flood of user feedback and frustrations of parts not working properly. Just responding to those that don’t like change is a full time job in and of itself.

One of the things that chips away at the ol’ headache is finding all the little things that need to be done on each site. Stumbling upon all the different nuances of each site that you somehow forgot about. Changing feeds, double an triple checking links, mobile pages, etc. Trying to figure out how to get something to work on the new platform that you had to find a ridiculous work around on the old site and you shake your head in disbelief of how in the world you were able to get it to work. Not to mention still learning how to work (or muddle) your way through the new CMS, all the while crossing your fingers you are performing the tasks right.

Here’s the three sites we launched:

• Coast Weekend
• East Oregonian
• Hermiston Herald

So yes, it has felt like I should be committed or at least heavily medicated the last few weeks from the work world. Throw on top of it, my son started kindergarten in the middle of last week and I’m getting ready to head out east to play cowgirl for a week while helping with online and multimedia tasks for the East Oregonian during the Pendleton Round-Up. Just finished out the Round-Up section and the planning of coverage. There’s my cherry on top of that smooth white canvas icing of the straight jacket I now find myself in.