Boar website relaunches
The Boar has re-launched its website today with a new look.
This is part of the newspaper’s 40th anniversary celebration, which commences in October. It also brings the website in line with the newspaper which was redesigned last year.
Chris Hackett, who was co-editor of the Boar during the redesign, said: “The old website was looking tired and needed a refresh. We’ve also moved over to a system which makes it much easier for us to upload content and make content more flexible and engaging. The old site often didn’t work too.
“It’s great that the launch has coincided with the Boar reaching 2,000 followers on Twitter.”
The Boar’s online edition is thought to have been last redesigned in 2004, when the reader comments section was introduced.
The website team plan to make subtle adjustments to the site over the coming months to improve it further following feedback from readers.
National student media website ‘Ones to Watch’ named the Boar its ‘Publication of the Month’ in February 2013, and the editorial team wish to build on this achievement by creating a more interactive and accessible online counterpart to its fortnightly paper edition.
Mr Hackett added: “We’ve tried to keep much of what we liked in the old site in the new one. It’s still easy to use, fresh and clean but with added features such as our new newspaper archive, sub-sections and more article flexibility.
“It will be much easier for the Boar to gain advertising to make sure the paper remains financially viable.”
The newspaper has won five Guardian Student Media Awards and eight National Student Journalism Awards.
‘Ones to Watch’ has also in the past nominated the Boar for its Student Publication of the Year.
Since its launch in October 1973, the paper has always been called the Boar, except in 1988 when it was renamed Mercury for a very brief period.
Comments (5)
As Robin above me states, it feels horribly like any old WordPress blog now. There’s very little content available on the initial homepage without scrolling (compare to any old newspaper like Guardian for a contrast.) Your slideshow is also stretching images outside of their natural ratios too.
Thanks for the feedback Robin and Daniel. You are right – the move to WordPress has already made everything a lot simpler for us using the site. We can do much more with content now (although we are still trying to get our heads around the new system). We will be tweaking the design over this term so keep an eye out for changes.
I guess the move from the proprietary CMS to WordPress will make the site easier to maintain but I think the design could do with a few tweaks. It still looks way too much like a generic WordPress blog.
Congratulations on the relaunch!
For the record, I believe the previous site was launched at the end of 2008/2009 (as detailed here: https://theboar.org/2009/05/27/boar-embraces-web/)
Going forward, is there any chance that you could please (please, pretty please) fix the legacy URLs so that old links aren’t all broken?
Thanks Nathan. We’re still trying to get our bearings around the new site and transferring old content. With exams ahead, this will have to wait a few weeks but we will be working on making sure old content is back up on here ASAP.