Virtually, all the work has been done in-house as it were by volunteers. I can't begin to explain just how many hours I've spent since mid July on this project, It has been immense.
The 'old' theme was a specially developed one (called Newsplate) based on The Byline Times and created by a small outfit called Yeswework. It gave us the opportunity to begin publishing articles by local writers and it slowly took off to include more high profile figures including Lords, Baronesses, former MEPs and people like Will Hutton, David Henig and Peter Kellner of |YouGov.
However, the site in my opinion looked slightly amateurish - although many seemed to think that was its charm - and the cost of making even small changes became a bit prohibitive. I should add that Yorkshire Bylines isn't exactly overloaded with money. It recently broke away from March for Change and now has a separate company called Bylines Network Ltd and is permanently struggling for money.
The old site had a fixed front page which had to be manually recreated every week or so. The new site is updated every time a new post is published with posts dropping down the order as the day goes on. It also looks much better (IMO), fresher, more modern and closer to other digital news sites.
All the YB writers and contributors work for free and the company has just one full time member of staff but it has somehow survived and grown and needed to have more control over the look and feel of the website as well as the content.
The new theme is an 'off-the-shelf' package which we bought and have had installed on a separate server firstly copying and then shadowing the live site. It is in fact the most popular news theme on WordPress with 10,000 downloads so you may have seen similar sites already.
It is phenomenally complex but immensely flexible and powerful.
We spent the first week just trying to understand how it all worked. There is a lot of documentation but most was learned by creating layouts and pages and playing around with it until we created a front page based on our own 'style' and began to seriously work on the changeover.
The key thing is that the whole look and operation of the site is under our control. We can choose everything including fonts, letter spacing, headings and colours and not be restricted as we were before, plus every setting (and there are hundreds) which determines how the site behaves is now available to us.
The theme is well supported by the supplier and I think it gives us a firm basis to attract more writers and to grow our audience.
A small group (basically two of us!) plus the editor, beavered away recreating various pages and we finally revealed the site internally for comments about ten days ago. We have modified and tweaked things following all that (it now has a completely different mobile page for instance) and everyone seems very happy with the result.
We scheduled internal training for uploaders last Thursday and started the changeover late morning on Friday. We had some technical issues because the staging site was developed on a separate server and there were huge amounts of data to move around and the site was live at around 9 pm on Friday.
Yesterday was spent fixing various errors, mainly missing images and broken hyperlinks and the site seems now to be running very well.
It is broadly pro-EU and anti-Brexit and if you like it, please tell your friends and spread the news!!
And if you can make a donation - however small - it would be gratefully received.
I'll try to post something on here more often from now on.
