The Insiders
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Aug
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Insiders 3.0!
Posted by: Neal Yonson | August 26, 2010 | 1 Comment
Here at Insiders central, if there’s one thing we’re good at, it’s leaving old websites in our wake.
First there was Insiders 1.0. No joke, it was pretty awesome. It gave everyone a great outlet to talk about issues, occasionally flame each other, but most of all to learn about the issues of the day.
About a year ago, Insiders got some new editors and moved away from the dinosaur known as blogspot to these swanky new WordPress digs as part of UBC Blogs (back when it was a more exclusive club). It may have been slightly aesthetically lacking but the core was based on some really kick-ass stories.
This is one final post to announce the creation of www.ubcinsiders.ca, AKA “UBC Insiders 3.0” where we now live and have discovered the that using pictures is a good thing. We’re excited and hope you’ll continue to visit us there.
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A little explanation as to why we moved. While the UBC Blogs platform offered us a great home while we were here (and much love to the new upgrade), we’re an ambitious bunch, and there were a number of things we felt limited by.
On the new site, you’ll notice a handful of features.
* Asides: We found we were throwing out the vast majority of the stuff we found, because either it was too small, or not newsworthy enough for a full post. We’ve now captured this content into short, one paragraph posts, called “asides”.
* Graphics: Our recent survey indicated people didn’t like the site design. Yes, it is bland, and that was the original intention. As we try to expand our audience though, we needed more graphical control.
* Complete control: Now, since we own the server and domain name directly, we can do things like: properly implement our calendar feature, register @ubcinsiders.ca email addresses, upgrade our wordpress ourselves, and have autonomy from UBC’s servers (not that we suspected anything fishy).
* Business management: We’re trying to grow. In order to grow, we needed to take our business practices more seriously. Things like: monitoring site visits, site usage, feed subscriptions. Now we’re keeping detailed track of how Insiders is used and our reach. By integrating a new revenue stream (ads) into this, we hope to develop the capital to expand even further.
* Alex could learn WordPress better: I was looking for a Summer project. Learning WordPress better was on the backburner, and this was an obvious venture to tinker with.
So, we’ll hope you’ll come along to the new site. It’s you, the readers who keep us going, so please keep up the remarks in the comments, and let us know how we’re doing!