This is an attempt to provide you with a rundown on the major differences between your current website and the site on the staging server.
basically they are the same.
the new theme is really an update to your current theme … created to take advantage of the updates made in WordPress.
it requires fewer plugins … this speeds up your website.
it takes advantage of “blocks” to make edits quickly, easily add elements into articles and allows for more flexibility with your sidebars.
looking at your website traffic … more than half is on a mobile device, iPhone accounting for 45-percent of that.
While your page views over time are in the upper thousands … your week-to-week visitors are largely repeats around 12,000 strong.
And each week, most of your visitors are from the same geographic locations.
This is a great opportunity for target advertising. (proposal on this to come)
Navigation
Main Navigation
Keeping in mind most viewers are on a mobile … the fewer dropdown menus the better. Your current site has two dropdown menus in the main menu and one in the top menu.
the updated site only includes one drop down.
Top navigation is specific-task driven … E-Edition | Subs | Ads | Contact
Mobile Navigation
Visitors scroll from top to bottom of the homepage … from the top they can dive right into the category they want … news — sports — editorials … classifieds.
Scrolling down they can dive into the latest headlines …
And, the new block system allows us to put breaks in a page to split up the sidebars on mobile & tablets.
Inside
Reorganizing the menus meant making a few changes to the post categories.
When you post a new article … selecting the category is the same as before.
New is the consolidation of Calendar | Features | Online X | Profiles
They are now sub categories of Weekly.
Which provides the opportunity to give Weekly a landing page … a new ad placement for what will become a popular page.
Every category is a landing page now .. with ad placements set individually.
Changes to the navigation are really just a reorganizing and removal of dead content … such as bench talk … Those articles remain on the system in archives.
And a new category is Special Features
Special Features are created just like posting a new article.
Again, another new ad opportunity.
This also preserves past pubs in an easy-to-access way.
Each pub has its own post-page, giving us better tracking on views.
Posting
Posting articles might look different … but it’s just copy and paste as before … easier once you do it a few times if it feels too different at first … it becomes very natural.
Pages
You will still have to go to pages to update classifieds.
However, you will now have far fewer pages to navigate.
… post categories takes the place of pages to create article-landing pages, so you only need 14 pages vs 22.
Plugins
The updated theme also allows us to eliminate nearly all of your current plugins, which improves security and performance.
While the new update eliminates plugins, I have exchanged Advanced Ads with AdRotate. However, It does appear that you are not really using Advanced Ads anymore to do your ad insertions.
I recommend purchasing and using AdRotate going forward.
I have an idea about Ads that will include this recommendation and I will try and put a short proposal together on it later.
What Next
These are the “major” changes for the update.
There are a lot of changes to the theme’s design capabilities, but these are the changes/updates that affect your ability to update your site with new content each week.
Before the site would go live, it would be updated with the latest content and same ad displays.
If you are available to review a test run this weekend … we can move forward with the change.
There could be a few issues to work out by taking it live .. this would give plenty time to fix or revert back. just let me know.
cheers.