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Changes vital for going viral
e-KNOW editor/owner
If you’re like me you are scowling at e-KNOW right now.
I hate change, especially to well-adapted daily rituals and routines. I’m a Virgo and a newspaper editor, meaning I am a snitty perfectionist who needs everything right where it belongs; exactly where I need it to belong.
Alas, that cannot always be, especially when it comes to keeping up with the times.
We’ve had to change e-KNOW for that reason; to keep up with the times.
Our new look comes with an entirely re-built website; from the ground up and the main reason for this update has been the mobilization of e-KNOW.
We are finally fully mobile-friendly, whereas our old site only really worked with a few devices and continued to lag behind.
While the site has changed in appearance a bit, it remains essentially the same, with individual sections featuring the region’s four key areas; Columbia Valley, Cranbrook, Elk Valley and Kimberley. Each individual site has stories broken down into: News, Kootenay Life, Business, Arts & Entertainment, Sports, Travel and Tourism and Views. All the top navigation bars remain the same but there are more features on their way!
Now, I’m getting older and I like my desktop computer. Almost never touch ‘devices’ like cell phones etc. Hate the things, actually. But in the information sharing world they are the new boss and becoming more so all the time. As e-KNOW heads toward its seventh year in operation, we are finding ever-increasingly larger numbers of people accessing our website from mobile devices so we have adapted to meet that growing demand.
There is also the fact that when Carrie and I started e-KNOW, we did so as frugally as possible.
If e-KNOW was a ship, she came out of dry dock barely able to float, sans guns, gas in the tank or a crew.
Shortly after we launched we engaged the services of a new age ‘Scotty’; the engineering genius who kept the USS Enterprise rocking along. Our version, Genex Marketing owner Chris Botterill, has kept e-KNOW chugging along as best as he could but advancing years, attacks from cyberspace and steady expansion of the site’s volume (about 16,000 stories published – all with photos) required our ship being torn down to the bare frame and re-built.
For the second time in e-KNOW’s life she has slipped out of a dry dock and we’re noticing wrinkles that need ironing out. To expect an eventless, smooth transfer of that much data would be folly and I ask for your patience as we tackle issues as they arise the next few days.
We also ask of those who, like me, hate change, to understand that moving forward with the old e-KNOW would have only resulted in more ‘outages’ where our site pops off line and more problems. This has been a necessary step to reduce technical issues and to ensure e-KNOW is accessible for as many people as possible. It’s also a sign of our success. When big stories break we get slammed with visitors and our old site was having trouble handling it.
I asked Chris Botterill to provide his view of the re-build he and his team have done.
“The biggest thing that is changed to the consumer is the aesthetics of the site. However, the layout and the stories that exist in this layout are actually placed into a very similar layout as the previous site. In fact, even some of the existing functionality still exists, ranging from the slider photos at the top of the page down to the way the thumbnails are arranged at the bottom of each story and the community pages. This was done on purpose as to not fully explode everything and give people something brand-new to have to learn. The biggest difference that people will see will be dependent on the devices that use to view the site,” he explained.
“I would say there are probably three key things that are addressed in this update. The first is speed, the second is stability, and the third is device compatibility.
“The old site was not exactly built with speed in mind since we weren’t dealing with hundreds of thousands of page views like today. We have not only upgraded the server technology with this version of the site but we have also implemented a light-weight approach to the way the site has been coded and we have implemented new modern technology that will help the speed of this site on mobile devices that use slower Internet connections. Overall speed is something that we should see as the one big thing this site offers. We still have some stuff that we’re implementing and rolling out such as compression of the images that are being uploaded but that is in process and should be taking care of in the next couple of weeks, as it’s a fairly large job.”
When e-KNOW first slipped out of dry dock on July 6, 2011, we had four readers; Carrie and I, Carrie’s Mom Velma and her friend Patty. Depending on what’s happening in the news in the region, we generate more than half a million unique page views in a month and our subscription numbers grow every week (we now have almost 20,000 subscribers). The growth of traffic to the site, as well as the site itself in terms of content, has meant continued strain to the old site, something we have addressed with this re-launch.
“In addressing the stability we found that the old site would buckle under the traffic of a massive new story. The updates and upgrades in this site should be able to handle the larger volumes of traffic to come through when breaking news stories are released,” Chris detailed.
The rapid changes in technology our world, and how we use technology, has forced us to update – like any business that needs to remain relevant.
“It (e-KNOW) was built for desktop in an era when there wasn’t even a clear path as to how the search engines would measure and rate which type of mobile technology should be used on the web,” Chris pointed out. “This website uses something called a hybrid responsive design, which allows the website to change the way it is formatted depending on the screen size of someone’s device. It also detects what type of device somebody is using when they come into the website and eliminates resources sucking elements in the page that normally would be shown on a desktop version of the site.”
Finally, e-KNOW’s changes will continue in minor ways as we add more features to our website over the next few months.
Please bear with us and again we ask you for your patience as we get everything into line.
And thanks to all our advertisers and readers for playing the biggest part in our makeover. Your interest and support is greatly appreciated. Cheers!
Ian and Carrie