We here at the Collegian are very excited and proud to have a brand new website, www.ashlandcollegian.com. Our new home on the Internet will stand as an electronic extension of our regular publishing, hosting everything that we run in our campus papers as well as web-exclusive articles, features, blogs and much more.

Combined with our active Twitter account (AUCollegian), having an easily accessible website for our paper is a natural and obvious move for us as news publications across the board move into the digital age.

Professionally designed and still based on “student written, student edited” content, this new site will prove to be an important step for the Collegian and its future as Ashland University’s student newspaper.

Keeping the Collegian’s longevity in mind, the initial progress of our site will be somewhat rough. Its development and growth will be guided by our current and future staffs as we strive to establish our Internet identity. At the same time, we face the struggles of maintaining a balance between our electronic and print products, something that many news outlets around the country are still working on today with their distributions.

As we utilize this new site, there are and will be growing pains along the way. You will see that the current site has a limited amount of content, blank pages and site features that aren’t currently being used. In the future, you will possibly find glitches and odd spots that need fixed.

We’ve anticipated this and we invite you to email us at [email protected] with your suggestions and complaints. We will gladly take them to ensure our site meets the quality standard of being your campus news provider.

You will also notice that the site is not affiliated with Ashland University’s website, www.ashland.edu. Our use of a group independent from AU’s Web Services was not a spiteful move but a necessary one.

Our website developer, TownNews.com, specializes in creating and maintaining websites for newspapers that are easy to use and easy to work with. Their mission statement, “To help newspapers thrive in an online world,” attracted us to them at a time when we needed an effective and functional website to call our own.

While AU’s Web Services has made vast improvements with the school’s website over the past year, the choice to pursue TownNews.com’s established services (more than 1,500 sites created for news outlets around the country) presented the best solutions to us.

With this new addition, our main purpose is still to present the news, featured events, school sports and local entertainment that surround our campus.

Our print distribution is still being steadily maintained and our new website will provide an excellent supplement to it so that all who have even the smallest investment in Ashland University can be informed in the ways that are most accurate, professional and entertaining, when appropriate.

We thank you for reading our paper and we hope you’ll browse our website, follow us on Twitter and take full advantage of the hard work that we’ve put forth to deliver your campus news.