FortBendNow

FortBendNow originally was conceived in 2005 as a 24-hour, seven-day-per-week online news site where readers from or interested in Fort Bend County, Texas, could find out about the day's most important local news minutes after it broke.

The conception called for an attractive site with design elements that would give readers strong visual cues to determine which stories might be more important than others. Also, FortBendNow would be ad supported, and required a method for serving and rotating ads on the site.

The result was an unusual magazine-style site with off-set column sizes in the top content row, separated by a photo that could be substituted for advertising depending upon news and circumstance. The original FortBendNow.com included a "liquid" design that displayed the entire page width to each viewer without horizontal scrolling, regardless of computer screen resolution.

The heart of the site was an automated news deliver system that "served" articles to the appropriate web site section at the appropriate time and day. With a couple of key strokes, the look of the site changed to accommodate weekend content. FortBendNow also included an automated back-end ad-serving system that calculated page views, multiple ad rotation schedules and much more. FortBendNow included several inside sections in addition to local news. It made use of a customized version of the Textpattern content management system, fully automating content updates.

Known for timely political analysis, business reporting and a series of local scoops, FortBendNow's audience and advertising grew rapidly, helping transform the site into one of the area's top news sources by early 2008, when the web site was sold to a group of former newspaper executives.