Redesigning & rebuilding the Mail & Guardian Online

Redesigning the M&G Online, the country’s oldest news website. Pics below of the first meeting with myself, Vincent Maher (Strategist), Riaan Wolmarans (Editor) and Matthew Burbidge (news editor). Absent at this particular meeting is Bryan Khumalo (Online Sales Manager). We’re essentially rebuilding the site and bringing the dev inhouse (previously outsourced) and we’re also changing over from .NET to PHP. We’ve decided to host the site at Internet Solutions.

After quite a bit of research we’ve also decided that we are building our own CMS from scratch. We didn’t feel that the open source options we investigated such as Drupal, Joomla etc were suitable. We’ve also had experiences with Drupal and are not mad about it, although we’ve had positive experiences with WordPress on our Thought Leader product. We also didn’t want to incur costs and licence fees that come with buying a custom news/publishing CMS solution. So after quite a bit of thought, the best option was to build our own. The main philosophy behind this is that its important that your CMS is tailored to the specifics and nuances of your business — so the idea is to build it from the ground up that way.

Charl Norman has leaked some of the (very first) mockups on his blog