DukeChronicle.com is refreshed.
When users log on to The Chronicle’s website Monday, they will be introduced to a cleaner design that is faster and more flexible. The new website is more capable of handling increased user traffic and complex content, and also offers greater opportunities for future updates, said senior Dean Chen, The Chronicle’s managing director of online operations.
“It’s been a long journey to come to this point, and we’re really excited to launch,” said senior Christina Peña, special projects editor for online. “This is just the beginning of a new Chronicle online experience.”
The new site—built and designed entirely by student developers—emphasizes visuals and incorporates more interactive features, such as integration with Facebook and Twitter, said Editor Sanette Tanaka, a senior. Additionally, editors helped individualize the layouts for their respective pages throughout the design process.
The product launched Monday is the result of nearly a year’s work of students from The Chronicle’s development and editorial teams, Tanaka added.
“In working on the design of the new site, we tried to enhance the content of each section in the best way possible,” Peña said.
Some new features include a home page slideshow, a commenting system that integrates social media and a greater emphasis on the news blog, she added.
In designing the layout, creators studied the design philosophies of other organizations—from Apple to Google—for inspiration. For Chen, one important aspect of the design was focusing on making it feel light.
“I wanted to try something more aesthetically pleasing and a little different,” Chen said. “When you look at the page, you should focus on the images and the articles and the text. The design is just supposed to make the experience more enjoyable but not subtract attention from the actual content.”
Although work on the site began last April, designers do not see what is being released as the final product.
“What we’re releasing is what… the industry generally calls the minimum viable product,” Chen said. “What most products do nowadays, is release the bare minimum to the market, instead of trying to predict what viewers want.”
Because a fairly basic system is being launched, users can expect a steady progression of updates, many of which will be based on user feedback.
“Most websites like Facebook and Twitter are rolling out updates every day,” Chen said. “We want to switch to a [similar] design model where we’re [continually] rolling out minor updates.”
When the online team began thinking about the design for the new website, they decided to build the site from scratch using new technologies instead of updating the system already in place, he said. This choice provided all department members with firsthand experience in building platforms.
Chen said that having a team of capable students who can continue to push the envelope in college news technology will be essential for future progress on the website.
This ability to update and change the website was an important factor in deciding to keep it an autonomous, student-run system, said David Graham, vice chair of the Duke Student Publishing Company and Trinity ’09. The Chronicle moved away from using an off-the-shelf software platform because the technology is inflexible. With a student-created design and administrative system, the website will be versatile.
“We had a talented developer in Dean, who was willing and able to lead a team to create a great site, and a leader in Sanette, who was willing to take a chance on the platform and work with Dean to produce something that would meet The Chronicle’s needs better than any outside product,” Graham said.
The software and infrastructure used on the new site—Node.js and the cloud—are different from other websites. Instead of handling one user request at a time, the system accommodates multiple people concurrently. This allows programmers to scale their code upward to handle anything from increased complexity in code to the number of viewers the site can handle, Chen said.
“We really pioneered a new area, which was both very cool and very difficult, especially when the core team was four to five people,” said senior Joe Levy, managing director of online development.
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