THE COMPANY

The Imperial Republican is an official county newspaper based in Imperial, Chase County, Nebraska. It is published every week by Johnson Publications, Inc. with Russ and Lori Pankonin as the co-publishers. The Nebraska Press Association named the Imperial Republican a Prize Winning Newspaper in 2008.

THE NEED

One of the goals of the Nebraska Press Association and Advertising Service has been to get all of the state's papers on the web. According to Pankonin, past President of NPA, while starting a web site and maintaining on a weekly basis seems to be a common fear, investing in a site and paying for it seemed to be a bigger fear. Last year, Pankonin began a plan to recreate his four papers' web sites so they would be easy to maintain and begin generating ad revenue.

THE OBJECTIVES

The client wanted to have the Imperial Republican website redesigned to change the look and provide features that were not present on the current site.

• Provide a wider screen width to accommodate additional advertising. The new site would be designed for a 1024 pixel screen width.
• Accept banner ads from NPA banner network. Also design the home page to accommodate banner ads in border areas.
• Review the menu to see whether it could be organized in some type of hierarchy and improve navigation within the site.
• The site should handle story pictures, sound slides, video, and flash.
• Content within the site should be easy to update – e.g. ability to upload stories, pictures, and videos.
• Stories are produced using a product called In Design, and needs to be able to be easily transferred to the website.
• Provide searchable archives of births and obituaries.
• Provide a searchable classified ads database. It should be easy to update and have the ability to create categories on the fly.
• Provide a link to the newspaper digitization service that is under development.
• Provide an online subscription service to allow access to PDF versions of the newspaper.
• Use a template-based approach to building the site. This would allow other newspapers to set up web sites with the same underlying functionality, but with different looks.
• Provide a searchable web archive of our news stories.

THE METHOD

Pankonin and Information Analytics had been collaborating on the site for several months when Pankonin got a two-week notice that his previous web site provider would no longer be providing service. With a two-week deadline staring at them, Pankonin worked closely with I.A. programmer Giang Pham to finalize and fine-tune the new content management system. At the end of the two weeks, the new sites were launched.

Using a webinar between Pham and the staff at Johnson Publications’ four papers, Pankonin said they were able to train people on how to run the site in about 90 minutes. Pham compiled a user's guide for the site detailing certain procedures and Pankonin created short Quicktime movies demonstrating in real time how to prepare and load stories and photos.

Due to the timeline, Pankonin said some expanded functions of the web site, such as flash movie capability and an e-subscription log-in, didn’t make the initial launch. These capabilities were added after the sites went online.

Joomla will also integrate with a web ad-placement program that NPA is reviewing to place web ads for member papers.

THE RESULTS

The new web sites are built on an open-source program called Joomla. The program is easily customizable so a template can be modified to create a distinct look for a paper's web site without having to start from scratch. Pankonin used the same template for all four of his sites, changing only the color theme for each. The web site can be edited directly over the Internet with the Firefox browser on either a Windows-based PC or a Mac.

The process of adding a story is quite simple and takes very little time, Pankonin said. It also allows for photos in stories.

They did some trouble shooting the first week and added some tweaks here and there, but overall, Pankonin said the launch went exceptionally well.

Visit the Imperial Republican site at http://www.imperialrepublican.com

Three of Johnson Publications' other papers also use the new content manager:
Grant Tribune, Holyoke Enterprise, Wauneta Breeze.

For more information, please contact Information Analytics at 402-477-8300, or email info@4w.com.