The Border Watch website
I’m putting the finishing touches to a new dynamic website for The Border Watch. It’s my modification of the Revolution News WordPress theme.
I hoped to develop something similar when I started at the Kalgoorlie Miner in January 2006. Although I stayed long enough to see the Miner’s website launched, it was not the outcome I envisaged.
The Border Watch is a privately owned company, which means the editor and management have greater autonomy.
When I told the general manager the website would cost nothing to produce he had no hesitation in giving the green light.
At Kalgoorlie, the paper is owned by West Australian Newspapers. That meant there were corporate issues to be worked through and an expectation of consistency across the group.
The regional sites were also secondary to The West Australian and you can see the differences today, although I’m told the regional sites will be upgraded.
Features I wanted in The Border Watch site included:
- Commenting capability on all stories;
- A discussion forum;
- Local weather page;
- Distinct categories for sport, farming, business, etc;
- Unique landing pages for our Millicent and Penola mastheads;
- Email subscription option;
- Local events calendar;
- Multi-user publishing.
Most of those are visible now. The site will be launched officially in a couple of weeks. At this stage I’m freshening the content and checking for bugs.
So take it for a test drive and let me know what you think. Either comment here or send me a message.
The separate category pages mean we can sell advertising that appears only on the wine page, for example, or across the whole site.
Through using back-end plugins I’m able to create users who can only publish to certain categories. I’m hoping volunteers might come forward to post sporting results and community news as it happens.
Down the track we’ll probably add video news. The opportunities are rather exciting.
I'm a 41-year-old father of four working as a newspaper editor at Mount Gambier in South Australia.
