ElseLoop

The editors of Salamander were looking for a complete overhaul of their existing website. Which is not surprising, since their previous site was just a handful of static pages built about a decade ago that they couldn't update without implementing a convoluted, three-person chain of events. They also wanted to offer their entire fifteen-year back-catalogue to online subscribers. And in doing so, they wanted to match their existing print aesthetic while still maintaining the reality of individual issues.

Getting the online subscribers option in place was the easy part—WordPress has long handled subscribers with ease. Creating an interface that was as easy <to use as possible for the interns and assistant editors at the magazine while also facilitating the level of control needed to create online issues was less easy. Wordpress traditionally likes long streams of posts broken up in small-but-still-large chunks. It reveals its blogging roots in that way. But we needed to have the ability to put up a new issue—poetry, fiction, book reviews, essays, art, contributor notes—and have it all linked together as a unit, while still maintaining the larger context within the bigger pool of issues. In order to achieve this, we wound up leaning pretty heavily on PodsCMS. This was out first experience with Pods and it proved to be, in a word, awesome. Any time we had a problem making the site do as we needed, the Pods forums had an answer for us. Not that we ran into to too many problems—the documentation is robust and implementing it is really straight forward. It was such a great experience, in fact, that we've since used Pods on a couple other projects. The result is stand-alone issues with full content standing alongside a larger pool of past issues. Just what we needed.

The site's design hinged on translating the long-standing print designs onto the screen. We hit some bumps (particularly with typography; not surprising, perhaps, for a literary journal), but the final product both echoes the print journal and updates it a bit for its new digital home. We're using Adobe Garamond Pro for the body text, as they do in the print issues. The font is being served by Typekit (our favorite web font pusher), yet due to its thin line weight, it does have some rendering problems with certain operating system/browser configurations (Windows XP, I'm looking in your direction). So far the traffic numbers indicate it's a low enough percentage that we don't have to worry too much. And we're not going to, because where it looks good—for the vast majority of visitors—it looks really good.