Fresh off its 2003 Digital Edge award for its special online section “Long Road Home,” The Herald-Sun in Durham, N.C., continues to churn out a Web site that in many ways belies the newspaper’s size.

At heraldsun.com, readers are presented with a clean and modern design and features often indistinguishable from online efforts backed by much-larger newspapers.

The Herald-Sun (daily, 50,612; Sunday, 56,363) began planning the modern version of its site in December 1999, fairly late when it comes to online newspaper ventures.

The newspaper launched its original site in 1995, but those nascent efforts primarily only offered users calendar-type information, said Jon Ham, director of digital publishing. Yet the site managed to garner a Digital Edge award in 1996 for an online election guide.

Despite that early taste of success, The Herald-Sun didn’t roll out a full-fledged news site until the timing was right, Ham said.

”Our publisher, David Hughey, had developed a list of goals the site should meet, which we began calling the ‘Web DNA code,’” said Ham. “Every decision we made in the planning was based on that DNA code.”

Serendipitous launch

The retooled site launched on Nov. 7, 2000, Election Day. But the timing was coincidental, Ham said. The original kick-off date was September 2000, but software purchased expressly for the task of supporting the recharged site proved inadequate.

In response, the newspaper wrote its own code.

“Rocky Rosen, assistant managing editor and also a member of the Web planning team, began writing our own publishing system,” Ham said. Rosen anchored the site around ColdFusion, a Web development application marketed by Macromedia.

Rosen completed the task in six weeks. Testing was done during October and the site went live on Nov. 7.

“[Having to rewrite the software] was the best thing that could have happened to us,” said Ham. “Not only did the system — which we dubbed Webination — work extremely well, its functionality allowed us to revise drastically downward the number of people it would take to produce the site daily.”

Feeding the site

Locally written articles are prepared for heraldsun.com by copy editors, who slug and slot finished stories into the Web database after editing is completed.

A Microsoft Word macro automatically saves the story as a text file to a specific folder on the network, with special tags identifying the slug and department.

On the back end, Webination, which is also integrated with The Herald-Sun’s story budgeting system, scans the folder for new files. When one is found, the custom tags are parsed to determine the slug and department.

A Web copy editor manually imports each story and determines placement. At this stage, the editor also writes headlines and formats as required.

Wire stories, from The Associated Press, are fed to the site by AP’s Online XML service. All wire copy, for both print and Web, is funneled into The Herald-Sun’s editorial management system without requiring editor involvement, Ham said.

Most important get top billing

AP articles judged to be most important are placed on heraldsun.com’s lead, or display, position. Those stories update automatically, yielding the paper some key benefits, Ham said.

“That [feature] came in particularly handy during the Florida election story,” said Ham. “That story — slugged ‘Recount-Legal’ — remained in the lead national spot on our home page for six weeks and we never had to touch it. Even if a development occurred at 3 a.m., the story was immediately current on our site.”

Heraldsun.com was the first Web site in the Durham market to update local news stories during the day. That was always part of the Web team’s DNA plan, based to exploit the weakness the team had seen in other newspaper sites during the planning period.

To that end, heraldsun.com changes its wire lineup just before noon each weekday. Local stories, meanwhile, are replaced every evening around midnight. If circumstances warrant, however, the newspaper updates the site as necessary.

Site traffic spikes

People flock to heraldsun.com. According to Ham, the site gets more than 3 million page views per average month. Traffic spikes during special events and particularly during college basketball season, when area universities such as Duke and North Carolina State are playing.

“To give you an example of how important basketball is to our Web users, on Sept. 12, 2001, the most-trafficked story on our site had nothing to do with the terrorist attacks,” Ham said. “Instead, it was a story about a highly touted basketball recruit from Raleigh, Shavlik Randolph, calling a press conference to announce his college choice.”

Ham uses WebTrends site tracking software from NetIQ Corp. to keep tabs on trends.

Heraldsun.com has its own revenue goals it has to meet each month; companies can purchase packages that combine Web and print or opt to purchase solely online ads.

The newspaper’s ad representatives and print-ad manager work with The Sun-Herald’s new media sales executives to coordinate ad sales. Ham said heraldsun.com is profitable, due to the newspaper’s early goal to keep variable business costs low.

That goal was also the impetus behind the creation of Webination, which allowed the paper to produce the site with minimal additional personnel.

Indeed, heraldsun.com has but five people assigned to it: a director, an IT programmer and three ad employees.