Telegraph relaunches nashuatelegraph.com
If you are reading this then all went according to plan you won’t notice much different about nashuatelegraph.com today.
All of the news, sports and features on the site should look and act almost exactly as they did yesterday, and every day before.
If so, that’s good news because behind the scenes almost everything has changed.
Those changes, mostly to technology and newsroom workflow are courtesy of a new Web content management system (CMS) that we launched this aternoon.
This new system, called DTI Lightning, is the end result of a year-long project to provide a more flexible and reliable platform for all of the Telegraph’s Web properties. Some of our other sites, including Cabinet.com, FeastNH.com, TelegraphNeighbors.com and EncoreBuzz.com re-launched last month.
The specifics of the software involved will only be of interest to a few, but the result should be faster loading pages, fewer broken links and, in the near future, a host of new site features and tools.
Among the more obvious changes today on the Web are the addresses that designate sections and articles on the site.
For instance, the Web URL for this story: http://www.nashuatelegraph.com/News/245815-196/telegraph-relaunches-nashuatelegraph.com.html is shorter and much easier to read than our previous article links.
But, don’t worry all (or most) of your bookmarks to the old site will be automatically redirected to the correct section or article in our archives.
Among other obvious and not so obvious new features today:
• Updates to breaking news stories will now be published to the original URL, thereby maintaining permalinks and comments through all versions of the story – even after it is published in the next day’s paper.
• Corrections to stories will be published at the bottom of the original Web page, and we will have a corrections box of recent errors available on the front page of the site.
Because of the huge effort involved in moving the Telegraph (along with 15 – 20 other sites) onto a completely new technology, we decided to minimize the changes to the visual design of the sites for now. However, a lot more change is coming in 2010:
• A redesign of Nashuatelegraph.com, TelegraphNeighbors.com, Encorebuzz.com, and FeastNH.com among other sites.
• A unified registration system that will allow a single reader account to have access to the Telegraph comments, Neighbors, Forums, Blogs and other tools on the site.
• A new-and-improved events calendar, allowing reader submissions.
• An enhanced newsletter system including email and SMS breaking news alerts.
As with any move, a few things are likely to be broken during the process, but we will be cleaning up any loose ends as quickly as we can. So, if you find broken links or missing stories for the next week or two, don’t be surprised, but do let us know.
If you do have questions, complaints or to report a broken link, just leave a comment below or enter a help desk ticket using the ‘Feedback” tab you should see on the right-hand side of your screen. And, as always you an send an email directly to onlineeditor@nashuatelegraph.com.
