Just about every town in America has a local newspaper to highlight local news, sports, entertainment, restaurants, and activities, but not every town in America is right across the river from Washington, D.C., nor as iconic and historic as Alexandria, VA. As Alexandria’s only locally owned independent newspaper, The Alexandria Times serves as a fantastic resource for local news and activities. The talented staff at the paper covers a wide variety of topics, and the website provides an essential online outlet for the paper.
For the new Alexandria Times website, we secured a newspaper focused WordPress theme and built a highly stylized and customized interface for the paper. Features within the site include:
- Integrated social media
- Highly searchable and filterable news articles
- Online polling
- A multitude of advertising functionality
- Photo galleries and editorials
- Newsletter signup and commenting
- Years of archives
- A “most popular articles” automated listing
- Interactive community calendar
- Much more
In addition to the functionality on the website, a key challenged centered around the massive amount of archived articles to migrate to the new site. This included nearly fifteen thousand past articles as well as a strong hosting environment to store the files and to support large numbers of visitors to the website.