The Diamondback will launch a new, interactive website during winter break that will no longer be on the university’s server.
The new site will include polls and message boards, and stories will post sooner and more frequently.
The Diamondback’s staff will work with online design company Digital Partners to help facilitate and redesign the site. Digital Partners runs other college newspaper’s websites, including those of the University of Nebraska, the University of Georgia and the University of Pennsylvania.
“The Diamondback’s current website always seemed a bit outdated,” said Diamondback editor in chief Jonathan Cribbs. “I remember when I came here as a freshman and Terp Idiots was a huge, interactive online community that people went to, and since then there is nothing that has really come along to replace it.”
Cribbs said most students depend on The Diamondback for university news, and it would make sense to incorporate features such as online polls, which have been popular on other sites and may increase the site’s popularity. Unlike the current website, the new one will include advertisements that will appear under the masthead and down the right and left sides of the screen. A portion of the revenue produced by those ads will be given to The Diamondback, but Digital Partners will keep the majority of it.
Over the past semester, the current website has had a number of problems, including some stories from print editions not being posted and links that direct users to the wrong location.
These problems were considered when selecting a new site, but one of the more important goals is allowing Diamondback staffers to update the site themselves without the help of a webmaster so they can more efficiently break news stories in a 24-hour news cycle.
“We’ll be able to update the website in seconds, not hours,” Cribbs said. “I think it will be a really good way to be more up to date and more competitive.”
The new site will be at the same address, www.diamondbackonline.com, and will tentatively launch Jan. 10.
