Land ho!

Larry Levin Publisher/CEO

As we’ve gone live with our new website, it’s a good time to reflect on why we upgraded in the first place and whether we’ve succeeded in our quest.

The number of resources for creating and managing a website are seemingless limitless. We were initially overwhelmed with the choices of a vast universe.  

Where we began, then, was not with who we wanted, but what we wanted. We chatted among board, staff and others to identify the priority elements that a new website could handle for us.

The list we compiled was rather daunting, almost 80 elements! They were grouped into categories such as content, navigation, advertising, multimedia, etc. 

We then created a Request for Proposals (RFP) that was modeled on one that had been created by another Jewish newspaper (much appreciated, Cleveland Jewish News!). And we decided we would solicit proposals from two different types of firms: Those that create websites from the ground up, and those that offer template-driven sites primarily designed for media organizations.

We solicited from eight different firms, four of each type. And without boring you with the details, the choice became pretty clear to us — we did not need to reinvent the wheel with a unique, state of the art site, but rather we needed a very flexible site with many of the features we coveted at an affordable price.

With this analysis, we ended up choosing the good people at Town News. They service about 1500 media websites, and offer a friendly and powerful content management system (CMS in industry parlance), along with add-ons for advertising and other revenue-related functions. 

Even after only ten days, you can see that we are able to offer things that were impossible or difficult on our prior site…..social media connections, better streaming video, the ability to get news up faster and more meaningfully, blogs such as this one, etc.

We’ll use our blog space for more news and culture related items going forward, but I thought it best to give a summary of how we got here. Please feel free to comment or provide your own perspective on any of our blogs or articles! Sincerely, Larry