Northwest CanCon finds a new home Friday, August 08, 2008

Northwest CanCon has moved to a new home on the web, www.TrilliumMediaServices.com/nwCanCon.

The new address is just one of a number of changes to the site. Some of them are obvious, others less so.

What won’t change is the content: we will continue to bring the latest news from the Canadian music scene to Oregon and Washington, as well as original content that you won’t find anywhere else, including interviews and photographs of the many talented musicians that perform here in the Northwest.

The most significant change should be hardly visible at all: we have switched the engine that drives the site from wordpress.com to wordpress.org. The subtle distinction between the two means much more flexibility for us in terms of the look of the site, and allows us to add certain features that we couldn’t include on the old site.

Chief among those is advertising. You will notice that the site now includes advertisements from Google’s AdSense program. While we do not wish to clutter up the site with obnoxious commercials, this is the first, necessary step in making the site self-supporting.

Another noticeable change is the opening page: instead of starting on the news page, the new site opens with the concert calendar. We are still evaluating whether this is the best landing page for the site, but the thinking is that the concert calendar is the heart of Northwest CanCon: the site is all about finding acts that are playing in our region, which is the point of the calendar. If you move to a different page on the site, you can always click “Concert Listings” to get back there.

Our news stories have moved to their own page: click on “Canadian Music News” or bookmark this page.

If you subscribe to our RSS feed, you will have to change your subscription. Click the link near the upper right of the page, or here.

The other major opportunity that the new site affords is better stats tracking. While the old site offered some measure of our readership, it couldn’t (or wouldn’t) tell us anything about the geographical distribution of our visitors. By moving over to the .org system, we can now use the statistics tracker of our choosing, which will ultimately help us to serve you better.

At some point in the future, Northwest CanCon is likely to have its own domain. Until then, you can find us at www.TrilliumMediaServices.com/nwCanCon. Be sure to look for exclusive interviews with The Pack A.D., Thee Manipulators, and Dan Mangan over the next three weeks.