TheWeal.com – My First News Publication Website Wins An Award

While I was studying at SAIT Polytechnic, I took a position as the Web Master / Manager for SAITSA (Sait Students’ Association) newspaper. I redesigned the look and implemented a content management system that won a 2009 Associated Collegiate Press Award. Read the Press Release

Today, I just found out that the site I completely overhauled in 2006, won the ACP (Associated Collegiate Press) Online Pacemaker Award for its Two-Year Category.

When I took over the reigns of TheWeal.com, it was a static driven website updated with dreamweaver. Unfortunately, having to update the content every week was quite cumbersome that left archiving a complete nightmare.

The solution:
1. Find the right content management system based on their present and future needs
2. Design a user-interface, inline with current online news publications, that reflects the current branding image of The Weal and SAIT Polytechnic.

There were several open source CMS available; Joomla and Mambo of course, but I found ExpressionEngine to be the best fit; due to its ease of use for future web masters and it was scalable. I made my decision based on the following criteria:
1. Is it SEO friendly? (SEF URLs, Customizable Title and Meta Data, etc)
2. Is it scalable? (Open Source, Plugins, etc) – Just this past November, I created the script that creates an RSS feed so that web could submit it to Google News
3. Its is easy to use? (I wanted to limit the amount of possible I.D.10-T errors in the future)

I also added the social media buttons for Digg, Facebook, Technorati and Delicious to increase traffic which ultimately contributed to about 50% of referring traffic. Organic search refferals didnt exist before, but now contribute to 60% of the site’s traffic.

Thank you to Suzanne Trudel-Peters who gave me the opportunity to make this happen and Kudos to Kent and Raeleen for taking over the reigns after my student term ended.

Visit TheWeal.com