The launch of The Signal’s new website will be delayed until at least February 4 due to advertising issues, a source inside the newspaper tells SCVTalk.com.

A revamped The-Signal.com was to launch on January 28, following months of work, but the delay is not technical in nature. Rather, the delay “has mostly to do with getting all our new advertising up and running,” according to the source.

The Signal’s website is consistently one of the top five SCV- related websites according to Alexa.com. It has been online since 1995 in one form or another and for most of that time, the site’s managers have maintained a basic two column layout with a menu on the left side of the screen.

However, the source tells SCVTalk that the new website will feature “significant” interactive aspects, saying that the “SCV community will be able to contribute in many ways to our site.” The Signal has been hyping the new site for weeks in its print edition, but the source wouldn’t elaborate on what new interactive features will be available once the website launches.
In 2006, the website’s underlying technology was replaced with a newer system, though the look and feel of the website didn’t change much. The change made the website more readable, but several years worth of archived news reports, sports articles, pictures, and other online content were lost.

That won’t happen with the new website, the source tells SCVTalk. The Signal’s current website, which has nearly two years of articles and content on it, will still be online and will be linked to from the the new website.

That should be welcome news to readers who use the Signal’s website for research; currently The Signal’s articles are not tracked or stored in newspaper database systems like Lexis Nexis and ProQuest.

The launch of the new site comes less than a year after Jay Harn took over control of the paper as its publisher. As publisher of the Media NewsGroup-owned Red Bluff Daily News, Harn oversaw a website that allowed readers to comment on stories, input and search for events on a community calendar, and email stories to other readers.

That website, however, was part of the Media News Group empire, and all MNG papers, such as the LA Daily News, allow readers to do similar things.

In October, the Signal hired a former pastor from the Master’s Seminary to manage the paper’s IT resources and its website redesign. Jospeh Choo told the Signal that his goal was “to bring a fresh new look to the site, and, ultimately, create a site that will compete with the major online publications.”

Once the website is online, it will compete for ad dollars with other popular Santa Clarita websites, notably the advertising-heavy Hometownstation.com and Daily News.com, which features intrusive pop-up ads. Magazine websites such as InsideSCV, Magazine of Santa Clarita, and elite also have some online advertisements.

SCVTV.com sells advertisements that appear in its televised programs and in its Google videos, which are posted online.

Below are some images from how The-Signal.com looked in past years.

October, 1999

January, 2000

October, 2003