A North Wales newspaper was forced to use an old blog it created last year to bring readers online news after its new website launch was beset with problems.

The Evening Leader had planned to be posting news and photos to its new platform from yesterday after spending around six months designing the site with an outside agency.

But technical glitches meant it had to revive its blog (left) which it launched last August as an experiment and previously had only five postings on it.

One staffer told HTFP that parent company NWN Media was due to go live with nine new sites but there was “teething problems”, causing a few local online forums to “stick the knife in”.

“Just before the switch over we had broken all kinds of hit records and comments on stories, so it came with slightly mixed feelings that, even though we were switching to a much better site, we were losing what we’d built with our little online community,” the reporter said.

“It’s a real eye opener just how lost you can feel when the newspaper’s website goes down, almost like being in the dark ages again using a candle to move around.

“A few of our readers have gotten in touch as well to thank us for putting the stories on blogger although certain local forums haven’t wasted the opportunity to stick the knife in.”

Evening leader digital editor Christian Dunn said: “We have around 7,000 unique users a day and we wanted to make sure they could get their news.

“With all these new projects there are teething problems. Hopefully, everything should be up and running by the end of the week.

“The third party who designed the site has been working extremely hard to get things running.”

Until now all NWN Media’s daily and weekly newspaper titles had been using the website platform operated by Johnston Press.

The new-look Evening Leader site yesterday

Comments

Danny Chisholm (22/07/2009 09:27:10)
I myself had a very similar situation to the one that the Evening Leader unfortunatley find themself in when I re-designed my website. I had a community of around 5,000 dedicated people who daily visited my site for stories and the discussion boards (and still do I am pleased to say!), and it was chaos when the servers crashed and then the site archives got wiped. It took me more than 5 days to get everything back up and I can only dream of having the foresight and ability to fall back on ‘an old blog’ as the guys at the Evening Leader have done. I am a dedicated reader of their site, and it keeps me in touch with events back home- I am sticking with them through this and hope the problems will be resolved soon. Not everyone is as unsympathetic as your article might suggest! Well done to the team there for at least making sure they had a continuity plan!
Danny