Live and Ready: An HPR Milestone

The High Plains Reader soft-launched a new website last week. Hundreds of individual users have already visited the site. And the hoped-for interactivity is already happening: there’s a dialogue with readers that is easy and spontaneous, lively and real.

Unwound Design of Fargo, co-owned by Phil Leitch and J. Earl Miller (yes, HPR’s sales rep), created the new hpr1.com website. Whether it be content or advertising, the new site in fact changes how HPR will manage content and in some regards, do business, in the future.

“I think the biggest highlight will be for the staff. Because we used a solid content management system as the basis for the new site, we can allow the staff complete control over the content.” Leitch explained. “I think the readers will find that being able to comment and get involved more with the paper will be the biggest highlight for them.”

Leitch’s goal was to create a much smoother process for the HPR to update and maintain the site.

“We wanted the staff to feel they have ownership of it from top to bottom. We also wanted to be able to draw the readers in more by giving them the chance to join in the conversation,” he said. “Integrating advertising was also something that we had to be aware of and hopefully we haven’t positioned the small amount of advertising that there is to be too obstructive or annoying. Annoying ads don’t serve anybody well, the reader or the advertiser.”

Feedback after hpr1.com’s soft launch was entirely positive.

“I think over the next couple of weeks, as we roll out more features that the readers can use, they’ll like it even more,” Leitch said. “We’ve slowly started testing the ability to add a story to a list of favorites and also to email an article to a friend. If you poke around, you’ll see both features around the site. As the kinks get worked out, we will roll them out into all the sections. We’re also planning to incorporate more interactive and community aspects to the site.”

The opportunity is there to be able to do some pretty cool stuff.

“For example, we have a pretty good database of local venues that we use to make it easier for the calendar people to attach a venue to a given performance. But as that venue database grows to include more local businesses, it wouldn’t be that difficult to roll out a city-wide directory. A dining guide. A shopping guide. A guide to where you can get your oil changed,” Leitch said. “Once that is done, and you combine it with a ratings feature that we are also working on to rate articles, then suddenly we have a way for local people to rate local businesses.”

“In the case of the HPR site, we were mostly given free reign to do anything we wanted,” something Leitch says is great for them but rarely happens in the real world.

Managing ads as well as content was a big challenge in creating the new hpr1.com site. “Advertisers will be able to target specific sections on the site or even specific times of the day. Coffee shops might want more of their ad impressions to display earlier in the day while the pizza places that deliver late into the night might want their ads to show up between 1 and 6 a.m.,” Leitch explained. “We’ll be able to sell ads by the click or the impression or even exclusive sponsorship rights to a certain section for a certain time period. While most people probably don’t get too excited about ad-serving software I’d have to say it is one of the cooler aspects of the new site.”

Leitch is pleased with the site and the launch, so far. “When I showed it to a good friend of mine he said it was ‘plain but usable.’ I think I’m pretty happy with that assessment. I mean sure, we could have done some crazy ass design that was like ‘Wow!’ but if it isn’t usable what good is it? I tend to lean toward simple, minimalistic designs that are geared toward making it as easy as possible for people to use. People don’t have time to figure out how a cool Flash navigation works or what your esoteric navigation titles mean.”

The hpr1.com site was built to Web standards using CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and XHTML, which gives great flexibility to easily modify the site along the way. “That also means that we can make changes to the design along the way as well. So who knows, one day you might check the site out and there will be a gigantic artsy photo of Raul in a Speedo standing on Broadway during a blizzard as the background image.”

Formerly with Sundog in Fargo, Leitch brought vast local experience to the table. “I’m sort of a tech snob (I realize this) and have gone mostly with my gut and past experience with similar sites. I managed my own online zine, yahtzeen, from the mid-’90s until around 2000-something, and also led the design and development team of FargoWeb.com when I was with Sundog,” he explained. “Plus, I’m always keeping up with what is going on online anyway; my wife loves it that I sit and read RSS feeds every chance I get. I’m a walking encyclopedia of useless tech news that probably only appeals to my equally nerdy friends.”

Ever so humbly, Leitch claimed the biggest challenge he faced in creating and launching the new hpr1.com website was himself. “I’m notoriously scatterbrained and can get sidetracked on the tiniest of details. I think I had the site about half complete at one point when I decided I didn’t like it anymore and pretty much started over,” he said. “Content is almost always the biggest culprit that holds up site development. Which is odd in this case because HPR solely exists to create content (laughter).”

Who is Phil Leitch? What is Unwound Design?

I worked at Sundog for about 11 years before leaving them in October of 2006. My last few years there I fell in love with Expression Engine, the CMS we are using for the HPR site and all of the Unwound Design client sites. It was then that I really wanted to start delivering big idea solutions to businesses with smaller budgets. You’ll see places that offer you a Web site for $300 and another place offer a pretty similar site for $10,000. It’s hard for a business that doesn’t really understand new media to know what to do.

I wanted to try to fill that void with great design, great features and a great price. It’s always a fine line though between how to balance working with smaller clients, as many times you will find they need more education. Which isn’t a bad thing. Without learning more they are really prone to getting screwed by a company that could care less.

We feel that unless our client’s site is successful we haven’t really done our job. We provide continued analytics and other services after the site launches to help them generate traffic to their site and ultimately a return on their investment. The better they do the more likely they will want us to help them grow their site with them.

There really is no reason a small or medium sized business can’t have a site comparable to sites that are built for tens of thousands of dollars at a fraction of the cost. The biggest difference between a small downtown store selling clothes and JC Penney is that JC Penney by nature of their size are going to require a lot more bandwidth and servers to handle the load. As far as features and design there is no reason the small store can’t have a better site. If you become successful enough to worry about bandwidth and how your site scales to handle the traffic...well I don’t think that is a bad problem to have, is it? Build what you need for today and worry about tomorrow when that happens.

Unwound was officially started once Jay and I agreed to work together. I was horrible at selling myself and for whatever reason Jay seems to be good at selling. Since then we’ve been growing at a nice pace and pretty soon here I think we’ll need to hire at least one more body to handle some of the load. Again, that shouldn’t be seen as a bad thing, having to hire staff to handle work.

As told to John Strand