Boosting the Startup Online Newspaper Rett24

After twenty years Kjetil Kolsrud went back to his roots in the legal and editorial world. He combined his knowledge of law and journalism to build the startup online law newspaper Rett24.

His old friend Runar Myklebust suggested that Rett24 should be built on Enonic—even though a CMS alternative like WordPress was tempting due to its low coding skill requirements.

However, Enonic is fully flexible, can scale to fit any need, and has a user-friendly editor. Kolsrud therefore agreed to base his startup on the Norwegian content platform.

Challenge

While not lacking in tenacity and optimism, Rett24 was only Kolsrud, with the addition of Myklebust, an expert from Enonic.

Kolsrud’s expertise in law and journalism, and Myklebust’s expertise in back-end development left a blind spot for expertise in front-end development, that is HTML and CSS.

There was also a challenge from an editorial point of view. A big challenge was to get the site to be as editor-friendly as possible, making it easy to work as a one-man show.

Adding to the challenges were the constraints of time and limited resources—a perfect recipe for an uphill battle. However, due to Myklebust’s deep knowledge of Enonic the challenge was still accepted head-on.

Solution

Drawing on inspiration from other online news sites, the Rett24 team decided to give the website a traditional design—focusing on presenting the content in an easy and effective manner.

The front page would consist of a grid, while the articles themselves would leverage the content in a classic design formula.

The duo sat together with limited Internet connection and coded the emerging website, but the connectivity issues were of no importance as Enonic made it easy to download and set up a developer environment locally and then get to it.

While none of the involved had any expertise in HTML and CSS, they also didn’t have much experience with marketing tools like Google Analytics.

However, it was easy to integrate with third-party tools through Enonic Market, making it a breeze to get started here as well.

The possibility to edit from a mobile phone has also been very useful for Kolsrud.

Myklebust developed the front-end through the CSS module set Pure, and made the front page consist of a series of optional components on each row.

For instance, Rett24.no can have 1 article on a row, or 3 articles on a row with one big and two small, and so on—with Enonic allowing flexible layout options both vertically and horizontally.

Kolsrud, on the other hand, used the responsive drag and drop Page Editor to easily handle the rest of the design elements, while also taking advantage of the intuitive WYSIWYG features.

In total, the entire website consists of only 10 different parts, including parts for “showing content”, a carousel for job listings and person news, a banner, an item list, featured person list, and so on.