| Turf Monthly is Australia's longest running thoroughbred horse racing magazine. They had been running a static brochure-style web site for a number of years but hadn't been doing much with it. Late in 2006, Art Director Liam Ferguson came to us with a design for a new site. Since the focus of the magazine is on news relevant to the racing industry and this content changes daily, a key requirement of the new site was that Turf Monthly staff be able to edit news stories and maintain content over the web.
As a graphic designer, Liam had very clear ideas of the way he wanted the site to look. Our role in the process was as implementors, taking Liam's page designs and turning them into functioning web pages. Throughout the process, Liam had complete control over the look and feel of the site. Our use of Extensible Stylesheet Language (XSL) technology makes it very simple to make changes that affect the entire site, or just one page.
All page content is stored as XML, making it possible to work on the page layout independently of the actual 'words' used on the site. This allows the two tasks of content and layout maintenance to be separated, so that HTML and CSS skills are not required to change an address or the wording of a paragraph.
| For the site, we built an editorial system based on plain HTML. This reduced the complexity of the platform, as there are both PC and Macintosh workstations in the environment, and removed any reliance on specific client-side technology. We ruled out a full content management system early on because 90% of the functionality delivered by such a system was not required.
Articles are stored in a database in XML form, which provides a number of benefits. Using XSL, we can format the articles in a number of ways from the same source document. This ability was important because, in addition to the site, Turf Monthly distributes a newsletter to over one thousand subscribers ever day. So we have one stylesheet which displays the article as a web page and another which displays it within the body of an email.
The same technology would allow us to format the article for printing as a PDF for example, or distribute it to partners in machine-readable form via the web should that ever become necessary.
In addition to the web site, we have developed a bulk email delivery system which allows the daily newsletter to be sent out to a subscriber database of over a thousand email addresses. This is intregrated with the site content editor so that the email is sent automatically when an 'edition' of the site is published.
The new Turf Monthly site was launched on June 1st, 2007. |
