Business

Editor’s Note: New Website Is Almost Ready To Go Live

The new style for NorthEndWaterfront.com is almost ready to go live!

Today’s note is just to give you a heads up (and a sneak peak) that the site may be intermittently down for the next 24-48 hours until we go live this weekend.

What’s the new site going to bring? It will have a professional, newsy grid format with headlines along the top and a really big graphical (and video-capable) front page slider. The posts themselves will have newspaper-like column formatting for easier reading and lightbox galleries for awesome photos.

Event announcement submissions have been overwhelming, in a positive way. In response, I will be setting up a way for people and groups to upload their own flyers, announcements, news and photos.

A major change is reverting back to real-name only commenting using Facebook’s login system. For better or worse, comments from the old site will not be transferred over.

I’m amazed at the iPhone/Android/Blackberry traffic and excited to offer a mobile format of the web version, and there are plans for an app too! Integration with all the social networks will be easier too.

The good news is that I was able to import all the 3000+ articles posted over the past three years. The site will still be non-commercial, Creative Commons and we have ported over the most popular features, such as the calendar, polls, e-newsletter, etc. All the articles will continue to be posted on Facebook, Twitter and we’re looking at doing that for Google+ too. The Forum is something we’re thinking about how to do better in the future.

The bad news is that I have to reload all the images on the new site manually. This will keep me busy in the weeks and months ahead. Of course, there will be some hiccups, broken links, etc. … so, I ask for your kind patience during the transition.

Overall, I’m excited about bringing the new site to the community! Stay tuned and check back here this weekend for a brand new website. Thanks for all your support! —Matt C.

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