Dragonfly Media Curacao

It’s the last month of the year and this is traditionally not only the time of year where people party and eat too much, but also the time of year where people want to finish projects. The web design business in Curacao is no different in this respect so we will be launching several websites and website enhancements this month.

The new website for local newspaper Extra is the first website we put live this month. For the people outside Curacao who read this: Extra is the most popular newspaper of Curacao. The Extra is written in Papiamentu (Curacao’s local language) and they print 25,000 copies per day. On a population of ~150,000 this means that one in six Curacaoans buys this newspaper.

For this website we needed to deviate from what we have done in the past, design-wise. This is our first website specifically designed for Antilleans. and they truly have their own style which is very different from American and European styles. After some research, a lot of internal discussions and numerous drafts, the client eventually decided to go for the design that is live now.

The Extra’s new design is ‘in your face’ with strong colors and a lot of content per page. The Antillean people appear to like their design with a touch of scream and a lot of action. Sometimes this is translated into designs that seem angry with contrasting colors and animated objects which is, of course, not what the Extra wanted. So, we have tried to find consensus between action and chaos and between being heard and screaming. You can be the judge of whether or not we succeeded.

What is unique, on Curacao, about this website is the fact that people can comment on news stories directly on the website. All, moderated, comments appear below the news article and not in a separate forum away from the content. This is a very bold move of the Extra because tempers can flare in the comments, but it also serves as a huge magnet to visitors.

With the standing and popularity the newspaper already has, adding the comment functionality to the website gives Extra the opportunity to become not only a hub for local news, but also a very active community. This potential was already visible yesterday. The site went live around noon local time and before the end of the day there were already many comments from people in Curacao, but also from Antilleans abroad (US, Latin America and Europe).

For this website we used the Open Source CMS Joomla. This CMS is especially useful for news sites because of its strong focus on temporal content, its archive function and of course its many community-built extensions. Especially extensions like MxComment (comment functionality) and SH404SEF (search engine friendly URLs) were very useful.

The one drawback of the version of Joomla we used is the fact that it uses tables for just about everything. This meant that we had to fiddle around in the code a lot to accommodate a layer-based structure but that wasn’t too hard. In the near future they will come out with a layer-based structure, but regretfully we coudn’t use it yet for this website. We are very happy with Joomla in general and will definitely use it more in the future.

Anyway, check out extra.an and let us know what you think.

PS: we have to give kudos to Tommy (one of our interns, not the dog) because he did a lot of the research and work on the design of this website. We think he did a very good job on this project.

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This entry was posted on Thursday, December 6th, 2007 at 7:29 am and is filed under Web design. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.