Story ID: 
AIN Launches New Website
By: Matt Thurber
Caption: The AIN team has been working on its new website for the past two years, and now it's ready for action.
Word Count: 641
Welcome to the new AIN Media Group website!
A lot has changed in digital publishing technology and design principles since we last did a major update to the AINonline site in 2011. Back then, print magazines were dominant, and websites attempted to mimic their print counterparts. Now published content lives mostly online, and as such has taken on a life of its own distinct from the constraints and strictures of the print medium.
AIN’s new website reflects these changes and, we hope, gives you the reader (content consumer?) a more enjoyable experience and an easier way to find what you’re seeking. And at the same time affording the pleasure of discovery that should be the main feature of any online content repository.
We’ve been working on the website for almost two years and the project is admittedly overdue and over budget. While our first 1990s website lived on two 1.44-megabyte floppy disks, today all of our historical content and the new material that we add every day of the week consumes thousands of gigabytes. Managing, storing, and delivering all of this content is an extraordinarily complex process, and AIN’s talented developers, led by Cam MacPherson, have put in countless hours and late nights coding, testing, and tweaking to make the new site a reality.
AIN COO David Leach made a huge contribution to the new website, undergoing a crash course in site testing and bug fixing. We also owe big thanks to design firm Four Kitchens for helping us refine the look and feel of the new site and getting the coding process underway.
The key change that Four Kitchens designers recommended is to make the website modular. While it might not necessarily be immediately apparent, the modular design allows us editors more control of the look and feel of the website. We can easily change the layout of the home page, highlighting various elements depending on whether the news of the day is an important safety story, a compelling video, or a fascinating photograph that we want to highlight.
While it does take more of our time to manage the website, we editors like that we have more control over the way it looks. It’s early days yet and we’re still exploring all the ways we can present our content, but we welcome you to join us on this journey and we also welcome your feedback.
Stealing shamelessly from one of my predecessors, former AIN editor-in-chief Randy Padfield writing about our last big website redesign: “One thing that has and will not change is the editorial philosophy of AIN. Jim Holahan, AIN’s founding editor, would often remind his editors and freelance writers what this philosophy is. About a year after I had joined AIN full-time in 1993, I asked Jim to put his philosophy in writing so I could use it as the introduction to guidelines I was writing for the editorial staff. This is what Jim wrote:
“What makes AIN different? Our insight, discernment, and background knowledge of the subject. Clear interesting writing. Good, hard news and not just public relations hype. We look for the other side of the story—what is the company not saying in the press conference? We don’t shy away from the truth. But be careful not to editorialize—stick to the facts. Write for the reader, not the advertiser.”
I can’t think of a better way to end this than Randy’s conclusion: “AINonline has a new design, but AIN’s dedication to providing its readers with timely, accurate, fair, balanced and interesting coverage of aviation and aerospace news from around the world remains the same.”