By Kevin Juhász
Editor

It’s located in the oldest city in the United States, but staugustine.com is using modern technology to communicate with residents of St. Augustine, Fla., and potential visitors to the coastal city.

Founded in 1997, 432 years after the city it covers, staugustine.com has two missions on the Internet — to be the reigning source of information for locals and for tourists.

“We’re in a small news area, but we’re also a major vacation destination,” said Ken Rickard, online director at Staugustine.com. “So we’ve got two core goals. One is to be the dominant news service for the community, and two is to be the dominant travel service about the community. I think that makes us different than a lot of news sites.”

The site attempts to present the news with depth and excitement, Rickard said, which means having a full-time person whose job is to produce two pieces of multimedia per week tied to the local news.

The site has a section devoted to travel and tourism that focuses on the best places to go and things to do. Of the 20,000 page views per day the site receives, Rickard estimates that approximately 50 percent to 60 percent are from people living outside of the city, based on which sections receive the most traffic.

The site is the online presence of The St. Augustine Record (daily, 14,902; Saturday, 16,651; Sunday, 15,970), a Morris Communications newspaper.

With a budget for only 3.5 full-time staffers, including Rickard, staugustine.com relies heavily on automation to get its information on the site.

“We just have to work really hard and we have to automate as much as we can,” Rickard said.

Staugustine.com uses a system called SiteWeaver developed by Morris DigitalWorks, the online division of Morris Communications. Morris DigitalWorks offers technology, content and services for newspapers in general, not just for those under the Morris Communications umbrella.

SiteWeaver is a customizable Internet publishing system designed to be an inexpensive tool to help newspapers to move content on to their Web sites quickly, automatically and with no HyperText Markup Language knowledge.

“It allows us to pull our paginated content from editorial and run it through a database that produces our pages,” Rickard said. It takes about 1.5 hours to get the all of the daily news on the site using the system.

The relationship with the Web and print staffs is not as close as it is with other newspapers. The Web site offices are separated from the print offices, but editors at staugustine.com and The Record will talk at weekly and daily meetings.

“What we do is intimately related, but they trust us to run with it,” Rickard said.

To help make it easier for visitors to find stories from The Record’s front page on staugustine.com, the site has a section called Page One, which has all the day’s top stories. Clicking on a story will then give visitors that story, along with an archive of related stories.

“For our size, we have a very good archiving system,” Rickard said.

Rickard pointed to a story on Beach Safety that offered a list of stories on the subject along with items on beach accidents.

The gallery is one of the most popular sections on the site. It features photos not only of places in St. Augustine, but also news and sports. The staff will get photos of various events from The Associated Press and create a multimedia presentation of images from news and events.

Staugustine.com is very devoted to the visual presentation of the news and local content. Some areas feature dozens of photos and pieces of video for visitors.

For advertising, staugustine.com uses Real Media’s Open Adstream 5.0, as well as a Morris DigitalWorks Oracle-powered classified solution.

Most of the site’s community section is powered by SiteWeaver, but the community area also features a “town hall” by E the People.

Staugustine.com also has a customizable e-mail edition of the newspaper along with a complete edition that can be sent to Palm Pilots, choosing a very modern way to get the news to residents of the country’s oldest city.