All of us at The GW Hatchet are proud to welcome you to our new website.
Our new site, hosted through SNO Sites, will give us greater flexibility in how we express the stories of our neighborhood, whether through photo slideshows or a customizable front page. Vitally, the refresh will restore our ability to publish our work on a platform that runs more smoothly than the previous iteration of our site.
We ask for your patience as we learn the ins and outs of the new website, especially for mobile users. There could be formatting mistakes or website slowdowns in the coming weeks — that’s natural in the course of becoming familiar with the software.
The change won’t mean too much to our readers — you’ll still be able to find us at the same web address, gwhatchet.com.
Our previous website was built from the ground up more than half a decade ago by Hatchet developers. The site served The Hatchet’s needs perfectly for that moment in time: the hosting was cheap and our developers handcrafted certain features necessary for our operations.
Unfortunately, when the team that developed the site graduated and departed, so too did our ability to effectively update it.
Our load times began worsening earlier this year, and we spent innumerable hours tinkering with code and settings as well as looking for options to update or move our site. As we worked on finalizing the new website, we lost the ability to upload articles and images online. Anyone who has visited our site in the past few weeks has likely noticed a lack of new content — our absence was not an intentional decision, but rather an inescapable technical limitation.
While we still published a pair of print newspapers to deliver straight to local newsstands, we’ve been devastated to lose the opportunity to share our work with readers who live outside the realm of GW’s campus.
Expect adjustments to be made and fine-tuning to be done on the site as we familiarize ourselves with the new software. We’ll be posting stories featured in our recent newspapers to the site in the coming days, backdating the publish times to when they were first featured in print.
Our website issues have presented an unfortunate obstacle for the start of our school year. Now that we’ve made our way over the hump of technical difficulties, we’re excited to post our award-winning journalism once again and share it with the world beyond Foggy Bottom.
The Hatchet is an editorially and financially independent student newspaper serving the GW and Foggy Bottom communities. It is the second oldest D.C. newspaper after the Washington Post.
