As you’re currently reading this article, you know things are looking different on depauliaonline.com. And that’s a good thing, we’re happy about it this time.

Three months ago I wrote a similar piece about The DePaulia’s website looking different, but that time it was out of our control. Our former website content management system College Publisher disappeared in the middle of the night, leaving our website in the hands of another company we knew nothing about.

It happened three days after our final issue of the 2013-14 school year, three days into my tenure as editor in chief. What a way to start a job.

College Publisher leaving us high and dry was nothing but a headache, but it was also a blessing in disguise. It kicked us into high gear to make the switch to a new website, a switch we’d been wanting to make for a while. Had I not gotten the, “is it just me or does out website look different” email from our advisor that morning in June, we wouldn’t be here with this website today.

So, welcome to the new depauliaonline.com. This website has been mine and our managing editor Grant’s labor of love this summer, but we couldn’t be happier with the results. Our new website is more customizable than it’s ever been, it’s mobile responsive (hey smartphone readers) and it will allow us to produce the kind of online storytelling packages we’ve been itching to create for years.

I’d still be crying looking at a jumbo .txt file of story archives if it weren’t for a few incredibly helpful, kind and generous people who helped this little project become a reality.

My first thanks goes to Brandon Wall of the Sun-Times. I stumbled upon a Twitter conversation he was having with another reporter about the horrors of College Publisher back in the spring, which got us talking. He laid out how he took his college newspaper’s website off of CP and migrated it to WordPress by himself a few years ago. He also introduced me to Dave Hansen, the Flyer’s editor in chief from the 2013-14 school year, who answered my helpless questions about homepage layouts.

But the biggest, most grateful thanks goes out to Nate Matteson. I had Nate as my intro to web design professor spring quarter. In the midst of my mid-June panic I emailed Nate to see if he could help me. Since then Nate spent who knows how many hours converting our 7,000+ stories published since 2009 on depauliaonline.com into a readable file for our new site, worked some php witchcraft to add more featured categories on the homepage, helped me find the super-secret .css files WordPress hides. I don’t think we could ever repay you for what you’ve done for us.

That being said, bear with us as we get into the flow of our new site. We’re still migrating old content into the site and working on redirecting old links, so we ask for your patience as we work through our final steps.

But most of all thank you, readers, for continuing to support The DePaulia and depauliaonline.com. We hope you’re ready for an amazing year.

If you have any questions, comments or suggestions, feel free to email me at any time at [email protected].