Medicine Hat News
- Type: WordPress
- Location: Medicine Hat, Alberta
- History: TriCube Media
Creating a website for a newspaper is no simple task and the Medicine Hat News was no exception. Designed by Dusty Melling(Opens in new window) and developed by myself and Jace Forsyth(Opens in new window) at TriCube Media(Opens in new window), many things had to be considered from the very start. Issues such as the placement and priority of information along with advertisement serving were the primary considerations, but we also delved deeply to consider how users with mobile devices could successfully access and navigate the website.
At the time of design the website was envisioned in a 3 column format with related information in each row. All top and local news, commentary, and so forth, were to be kept in the same rows to be easily related to and accessed by users. When viewing the website on smaller devices the information would collapse down to accommodate the varying resolution.
The website was developed using WordPress and was fully customized from the ground up using HTML, CSS, PHP and JavaScript. Customized functions were created and used for images, text excerpts, navigation and pagination. The website tied into Google DoubleClick to serve advertisements and tied into an online newspaper system from which the news articles were queried. After launch, the website was cloned and styled for The Lethbridge Herald(Opens in new window).
At the time I wrote a very detailed analysis of average website traffic to The Medicine Hat News website for both sales associates and clients to learn about advertisement serving, targets and impressions. To accompany this, I created a visual representation of advertisement zones with overlaying browser viewport resolutions to highlight which advertisements were likely to receive the most views. The traffic stats can be found here(Opens in new window) and the PDF representation of advertisements versus browser resolutions can be found here(Opens in new window) (31mb).