Experienced hand builds a better aurroranewspaper.com
The Aurora News had just the job for Corporal Ryan Naylor: build a better website.
Naylor arrived at 14 Wing Greenwood at the end of 2022 from 9 Wing Gander, spent one day with his new unit at 14 Operations Support Squadron’s Communications and Information Systems Flight and then posted to the Canadian Armed Forces Transition Centre Greenwood. Knowing he was medically-releasing from the CAF, but with time to use to best effect, could Naylor use his IT skills on an independent work project?
“I’ve build personal websites, and I did it for school. My education and previous knowledge helped a lot,” he says.
Naylor spent four years in programming and databases (plus a year of automechanics) at Nova Scotia Community College. He joined the Royal Canadian Air Force as an avionics systems technician in 2018, but then transferred to become an aerospace telecommunications and information systems technician – his first choice anyway.
At the Transition Centre considering a placement at The Aurora, Naylor initially thought he might be put to use as a reporter, writing articles and taking imagery of 14 Wing news and events.
“Then, we looked at the website…,” Naylor says.
An update to auroranewspaper.com was needed: the 2009-built site presented the print paper as a full PDF, but had no translation presentation, mobile ease-of-use or searchable features.
Aurora News managing editor Sara White and graphic designer Brian Graves worked with Naylor to breakdown what the online Aurora presence needed: clean graphics, quick-loading, a search tool, news categories, online contact forms, multi-lingual and accessibility options, a continuation of the paper’s online archive.
Naylor went to work. He built the site using free templates, White and Graves added input, and he started loading individual articles and images. It took 18 months to build, tweak and work through glitches.
“I learned a lot myself!” Naylor says, “and I reached out for help to peers in the military and friends for pointers.”
And then the site broke. It took several months, including migrating everything to a paid platform service, before it was finally ready to launch. March 18, Naylor and White pressed “publish.”
“We had loaded almost two years’ worth or content before we published, so there is already a deep resource on the site,” Naylor says.
Residents can pause delivery or share paper carrier information through an online form. Readers may enter any of The Aurora’s contests, check out what’s new in 14 Wing and local area News, Sports, Recreation, Events and Community news. Submitting a classified ad is available online; and the classifieds are posted bi-weekly. The archive includes The Aurora’s issues to 2009 (hard copies to 1953 are available at the office), but also back issues of the annual Wing Information Guide and At Home in the Annapolis Valley magazine. Plus, with 2024 activity celebrating all things RCAF100, everything The Aurora published about the RCAF’s centennial anniversary is available in a collected online archive.
Naylor released from the RCAF May 8 after 14 years in the CAF, and is already enrolled in the two-year online Coding for Veterans program, offered through the University of Ottawa.
