The Nebraska Journalism Trust took the reins of Silicon Prairie News last year to preserve SPN’s archive and enhance its coverage of the startup community in Nebraska.
We worked with SPN and the NJT team to relaunch siliconprairienews.com in early 2024 — a new look that shows NJT’s commitment to expanding the site’s coverage and audience.
Where the home page used to show a simple list of recent blog posts, now readers can browse a variety of articles, profiles and featured community events. A new set of logos, updated fonts and an expanded color palette helped modernize the site’s look and feel.
We also unlocked tons of design options for the SPN team — and noticably sped up page load times — with a new WordPress block theme. No more rigid templates stuck in a confusing page builder.
Now, editors can add, remove and style content across the entire site with the flexible, familiar interface they’re already using to write and edit stories. And it’s much lower maintenance on our end, too — we got rid of thousands of lines of code. Win win.
Check out the new Silicon Prairie News »
One final note about how we’re building websites in 2024:
If you’re considering a switch away from traditional PHP WordPress themes — or away from page builders like Elementor or Divi — Make the change now. You won’t regret it.
The WordPress Full-Site Editor has come a long way in the past year. It finally feels robust enough to handle all the challenges of building big, complex websites, without spending hours writing custom PHP. We’re using Mike McAlister’s fabulous Ollie theme as a starting point these days, and the development process is truly delightful.
