Fort Smith is a community in the Northwest Territories right across the Alberta border at the 60th parallel. Before 2016, the community had one of Canada’s best community newspapers that was started in 1977 as the Slave River Journal, drawing its name from the nearby source of water.
We were hired by the Journal to completely rebuild their website from the ground up with a new platform based on WordPress and using a theme that the owner had already purchased. At that time, this was the largest contract that we had to date. But we were up for the challenge!
[more information to come]
In 2014, the Northern Journal (and by extension, Bird Brain Web) were honoured with an award for the news website. News Media Canada (then Newspapers Canada and the Canadian Community Newspapers Association) recognizes community news publications across the nation for various aspects, including reporting, photojournalism, design, and even websites. We placed second for best website with a circulation of 4,000 to 12,499 readers.
All front-end aspects were considered during the judging, and at least one judge was from either the IT or web design field and another from news publishing.