It’s been a good week at Altrincham Today Towers.
First up, we were the only hyperlocal news title to be included on the shortlist for the O2 Media Awards North West, the biggest journalism awards event in the region this year.
We’re also up for Startup of the Year in the Altrincham & Sale Chamber of Commerce Business Awards, with the winners announced next month.
We’ll keep you posted on how we get on.
The nominations coincide with a very significant time in Altrincham Today’s short lifetime: a rebrand and redesign.
We’ve tweaked our logos for three reasons: to make the colour more distinctive; to increase the visibility of the lettering; and to introduce a ‘flat’ design that we hope will serve us well as we scale the company.
Additionally, over the past six months, we’ve been working with one of the country’s leading hyperlocal news web development agencies. From the bottom up, we’ve reimagined and rebuilt the site using the data and feedback we had gathered from its first seven months in existence.
So what’s new?
The most important thing to say about the new site is that it is completely mobile-first. In other words, while most websites start with the desktop version, we’ve started with the way the site looks and works on your mobile device.
Why? Simple: because the vast majority (over 80%) of our 80,000+ unique monthly visitors – as well as our 11,000+ social media community – read Altrincham Today on their mobile or tablet, a real sign of the way news consumption has changed and will continue to change.
Our starting point for everything – from the font size to the best way to display images – was whether the changes would work well on a mobile device. The result is that the site should (hopefully) be very easy to read, use and scroll – and deliberately uncomplicated in design and architecture.
We’ve also incorporated something called “infinite scroll”, which means that on mobile, once you reach the end of a post, a new post pops up automatically underneath. The idea is to give you a completely seamless reading experience of the most recent posts on the site, without the need to be clicking back and forth to the home page.
What else has changed?
We now have a much better jobs board that we will be looking to grow quickly – we’ve had phenomenal feedback from local businesses that have advertised jobs with us already. And we’re looking for a new member of the team ourselves.
We have a much improved events section that anyone can now add content to. If you have a free or paid event coming up, you can add your listing here.
And we now have a far more sophisticated advertising network behind the site, powered by Google, that gives any advertiser complete control over where their advert appears, how often and to whom. Full performance reports are included – email david@altrincham.today for more details of our packages, which start from 20,000 impressions per month.
But perhaps the best thing about the new site is what we can add to it – the site is just a platform for new sections that we intend to add as the site grows.
In the meantime, thank you for your interest and continued support in the site.
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