At the America East Newspaper and Technology Conference I learned that the Press of Atlantic City will be replacing their current website with a new one built on the TownNews BLOX CMS. The new site will launch on April 13, 2009 April 21, 2009 and it can’t come soon enough. Would you believe that this is how the navigation “works” right now on the old site?
Advertising and AP add-ons throughout the site pages as well as link mazes make the existing Press of Atlantic City site user-unfriendly. I sat down with TownNews regional manager Loren Widrick at the TownNews booth to learn more about how they were going to help the PressofAtlanticCity.com improve their site.
RI- What is the TownNews CMS built on? What does it use?
LW- BLOX is our new CMS. It uses Universal Template Language (UTL) an Application-independent output template language engine. The UTL utilizes PHP, CSS and XHTML but the newspaper’s content editor does not have to know any of that, our Asset Editor is really intuitive. The new Press of Atlantic City site is being built on BLOX and will launch April 13th.
RI- What’s so great about BLOX?
LW- BLOX is a great CMS because it is platform and device agnostic, it can render sites on a mac, pc, iPhone, or Blackberry with equal ease. On the front end, a social networking tool is built right into the site as well as a photo gallery feature. BLOX allows tagging all Assets which provide for sharing additional content in a story for example related images and vide.
As for the back end, the CMS is dynamic in that the templates can easily redesigned using a WYSIWYG drag and drop interface. The templates can be saved and previewed without making any permanent changes to the existing site, so it give the publisher greater confidence in trying new things with their layout, content, and advertising placement.
RI- Tell me about the Asset Editor
LW- It is powerful and simple. Articles, videos, photos, graphics, archives, audio, PDFs, polls, HTML, Flash, others – These are what we call Assets, they are not tied to articles and can be stand-alone. This allows you to create relationships between Assets, creating galleries and other special presentations of material.
You will no longer need to use tools like Photoshop to crop down photos to fit the page. Cropping and resizing can be done through the Image Asset Editor without the need for a third-party editor. Resizing and reviewing video is also done right through BLOX. You won’t lose time learning an image editing software, and you won’t have to spend money on such software. You can also create multiple thumbnails/previews of the photos from the interface.
RI- Who hosts the site?
LW- TownNews hosts all the sites we do. It’s easier and safer for everyone involved.
RI- Who is using BLOX now?
LW- The Quad-City Times in Davenport, Iowa and Portage Daily Register in Portage, Wisconsin are both on BLOX.
RI- How many sites use TownNews CMS?
LW- About 1600 in the US and Canada so we have TONS of experience. We do lots of weeklies and niche sites as well as daily newspaper sites. The Press of Atlantic City will be one of the bigger news sites we’ve built.
RI- any parting words?
LW- The BLOX CMS has increased our customers’ sites revenue by creating well laid out, search engine friendly, easy to navigate sites that link to many internal assets, increasing pageviews and user engagement.
RI- Thanks for your time
LW- Thank you
Visit the TownNews site for more information about their BLOX CMS.
Related posts: