the wordpress transition.

When I worked as a digital producer at The Daily Campus my freshman year of college, our website was hosted on Squarespace. As it turns out, Squarespace was not built for thousands upon thousands of posts, so the website was often glitchy and had very little of the functionality we wanted. The transition of the website from Squarespace to WordPress became much mythologized. The idea was longingly invoked whenever an article mysteriously disappeared from the website, or a page took minutes to load. So, when I was hired as the associate digital editor at the end of my freshman year, I was determined to make the WordPress dream a reality. This is a (long) explanation of how I, in collaboration with the digital editor Courtney, worked to create the Daily Campus website we have today.

• Research

  May – June 2020

  There were two main facets of our research: evaluating what didn’t work from our old website, and drawing on inspiration from news websites outside of organization. The former involved meeting with members of The Daily Campus to evaluate their opinions of our website and running surveys to glean what people generally didn’t like about the website.

  The latter involved hours upon hours of staring at media sites, mostly from college newspapers, to try to evaluate everything from font size to how to display print issues.

  This is where we ran into the central challenge of creating a website for a media outlet: fitting a lot (!) of information into a neat, readable page.

• Design

  June – July 2020

  The next stage was to consolidate our research into preliminary designs of what we wanted the website to look like. This was an early mockup of our homepage:

  

  This is what our final working mockups looked like:

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  Obviously, these are pretty rough, but it created a guideline for what we wanted the site to eventually look like.

• Development

  July 2020 – August 2020

  As you might imagine, this process took a lot of trial and error.

• First launch! (spoiler: this was a fail.)

  August 2020

  It was late in the night before the annual big, important freshman issue. Because of COVID restrictions, the freshman issue would be online only this year, so we’d been at the website for hours prepping both the freshman issue as well as our whole new website. All that was left to do was transfer domains.

  As it turns out, transferring domains takes about 48 hours. This was a really lovely thing to learn from an equally exhausted WordPress spokesperson at 2 in the morning when you’d spent weeks hyping up the launch of the brand new website.

  This is where a gap in research really caused a screw up. We failed to account for the time it would take to transfer the domain from one service to another.

  Lesson learned: the ‘planning phase’ of a project is a myth. Instead, the only thing you should anticipate next is the unexpected. The failure to launch wasn’t just caused by us not understanding how domain transfers worked (though a bit of extra research could have certainly saved us some time, pain, and 3 AM calls with WordPress support). On a more abstract level, the takeaway here was that projects often have unexpected roadblocks, and it’s better to keep your plan dynamic to account for them.

• Launch for real.

  August 2020

  After

  

• What’s next?

  Present

  We have to continue improving on this website.