See AL DÍA’s new responsive website

AL DÍA, the Center City-based bilingual news outlet covering Latino issues, unveiled a new website last week. It was built over the last year by Center City firm Eastern Standard, which was previously two companies: web dev shop Context and marketing agency Tabula Creative.

The website is an effort to revamp an outdated one and “recast our editorial image,” said Gabriela Guaracao, AL DÍA’s Director of Strategy and Operations.

“For a long time, our vision was more than a print product,” Guaracao said at a panel during Philly Tech Week 2014 in April.

AL DÍA hopes the new website will show readers the outlet’s broader scope. It’s not just a Philadelphia-oriented Spanish language newspaper for Latinos, Guaracao said, it’s a national news and events organization for both Latinos and non-Latinos. Half of their readership comes from the U.S. and half comes from abroad.

Also: AL DÍA is hiring a digital editor and an analytics and operations associate.

One way the company is communicating that is by offering every story online in English and Spanish. The translations will be done by staffers, not computers.

“Translations that are terrible undercut our reporting,” said managing editor Sabrina Vourvoulias.

Reflecting current design trends, the new site is responsive, meaning it’s optimized for browsers and mobile, and focuses on strong images.

The responsive design was important because more than one-third of AL DÍA’s viewers were mobile users, Guaracao said.

The new website is powered by open source content management system Drupal. AL DÍA had previously been using another open source content management system called Joomla. Eastern Standard also used framework AngularJS to build the site, which helps it move more smoothly between pages in a way that’s similar to Gmail.