Project: Highway58Herald

New Website for Upper Williamette Valley Journalism

“We launched our Highway58Herald.org site less than a week ago and I’m struck by how many of my media-savvy friends have commented on how easy our site is to navigate compared to many commercial newspaper websites. I believe that’s true as well. Nice work, Bruce and Nancy.” – Doug Bates, editor, Highway58Herald.org

Logo Creation:
Nancy designed the logo with the Highway 58 region of Oregon in mind. Using the state highway symbol, a watercolor-type graphic of mountains and valley, and a topographic map of the region for the lower portion of the shield, we all liked how this turned out … especially the client!

“I love the logo Nancy did (for Highway58Herald.org)” – Tiffany Sullivan, Blue Sprocket Brokerage

This second local online newspaper website project by Intent Design Studio – this one for client Doug Bates – came about through a referral by our client Quinton Smith of YachatsNews.com. Both Smith and Bates are “retired” colleagues and former seasoned professional journalists from the Portland metro area with a desire to give back to their respective communities.

Realizing that much of the local-news-specific customization that had been done (for the successful YachatsNews.com website) to the default child theme (Metro Pro theme using the Genesis Framework) could be leveraged to avoid “reinventing the wheel” we “cloned” the 2-year-old Yachats News site, removed all the content but kept much of the customization to provide a generous “hit the ground running” head start to this project, reducing both time and expense for this project.

In addition to the typical full complement of site features – such as detailed information architecture, MailChimp RSS-to-email automated weekly bulletins to subscribers, blog category refinement, site-specific plugin selection, configuration and optimization – we provided several sessions of hands-on mentoring via zoom (uploaded as private videos for later review, minimizing the need for note-taking) and also are implementing an email forwarding matrix of functional (role) emails that are forwarded to individual staff members for this online local news venue.

The site purpose: a nonprofit, nonpartisan news organization founded by volunteers to provide professional journalism and vital information as a free service to Oakridge and other communities along Oregon’s busiest mountain highway. Funded by donations, grants and advertising, this digital (and eventually print) media platform is being created to fill a news vacuum in communities desperately in need of accurate, comprehensive, and reliable information that citizens need to participate fully in community life and to stay safe in times of emergency.

Making good use of Bruce’s technical expertise and Nancy’s design know-how the site is pleasing to look at and is extremely easy to use…” very user friendly” as our client and his media savvy friends have stated.