The Skagway News
Skagway’s first newspaper, rebuilt around a masthead that shows the town’s weather as it happens
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Skagway’s first newspaper, rebuilt around a masthead that shows the town’s weather as it happens
The site
Scroll the page, and the phone scrolls with you
A full-length capture of skagwaynews.com, moving in step with the page.
Live weather masthead
A painted panorama of Skagway that follows the real sky: day, twilight and night colors, clouds by cover, rain, snow, fog and blizzards drawn frame by frame, flags and trees that lean with the wind, and water that rises with the tide.
The forecast train
A White Pass locomotive pulls the week’s National Weather Service forecast onto the front page, one car per day. Tap a car for that day’s detail.
Tides and daylight
Today’s tide curve from NOAA with the next highs and lows, and a daylight arc with sunrise, sunset and how much light the town gained or lost since yesterday.
Print and online subscriptions
An online plan and print-plus-online plans with five delivery options, from pickup in town to first-class mail overseas. Mailing labels and the in-town pickup list print from one screen.
Before & after
Then and now
Drag the handle.
The paper’s front page in June 2025 (from the Internet Archive) beside the new one, captured on a clear October night in Skagway.
June 2025Our 2026 rebuildVideo
In motion
What we built
16 pieces, one site
Live weather masthead
A painted panorama of Skagway that follows the real sky: day, twilight and night colors, clouds by cover, rain, snow, fog and blizzards drawn frame by frame, flags and trees that lean with the wind, and water that rises with the tide.
The forecast train
A White Pass locomotive pulls the week’s National Weather Service forecast onto the front page, one car per day. Tap a car for that day’s detail.
Tides and daylight
Today’s tide curve from NOAA with the next highs and lows, and a daylight arc with sunrise, sunset and how much light the town gained or lost since yesterday.
Print and online subscriptions
An online plan and print-plus-online plans with five delivery options, from pickup in town to first-class mail overseas. Mailing labels and the in-town pickup list print from one screen.
One reader account
A single account page for subscription, delivery address, saved stories, community standing, newsletters and billing, shared by every Hoke Designs plugin on the site.
Community comments
Every story is open for discussion, with staff approval, reputation that unlocks links and photos, community moderation and Cloudflare Turnstile to keep bots out.
New-story newsletters
New stories go out by email on their own, and readers can be reached by plan, delivery type or renewal date. Readers manage their lists from their account.
Visitor guide reader
The Skaguay Alaskan visitor guide reads page by page right on the site, with every edition since 2021 in a gallery below and a PDF to download.
Daily puzzles
A daily crossword, sudoku, word search, cryptoquote and scramble, set in the paper’s own type, in place of a third-party iframe.
Classifieds
Searchable listings with section filters and live counts, cards that expand in place, photos, and an end date that takes a listing down by itself. Staff post from a short form with a live preview.
Newsroom and ad forms
Topic cards route tips and letters to the editor and ad requests to sales. The ad form draws every size for the paper, the website and the guide, with a calendar for the start date.
Illustrated section menu
Hover panels with a drawing for every section and the newest story from it, plus a search bar that grows out of its button with popular topics and quick links.
Photo viewer and credits
Pictures grow out of the story into a full-screen viewer you can swipe through, with captions and photographer credits read from the media library, the file or the caption.
The archive, carried over
More than 1,250 stories back to 2014 kept their original addresses, and their old page-builder layouts are converted as they load.
Map of Skagway
The contact page ends in a full-width map drawn in the paper’s colors, at the head of Taiya Inlet.
Managed hosting and security
Hosted on our servers behind Cloudflare, with fraudulent accounts cleared out, spam-filtered forms and pages that build in about 0.6 seconds uncached.
The story
The brief
The Skagway News is Skagway’s first newspaper. The original Skaguay News went to press on October 15, 1897, at the height of the Klondike stampede, and closed in 1904. Jeff Brady revived the name in 1978, and the paper has served the Gateway to the Klondike ever since, in print and online.
When the paper came back to us in 2026, its site was a page-builder theme carrying twelve years of stories, a subscription plugin that had let hundreds of fake card-testing accounts in, galleries whose images had been deleted, and a visitor guide and puzzle page that were embeds from other companies. The paper needed a site a small newsroom could run on its own, that helped pay its way through subscriptions and ads, and that felt like Skagway.
What we did
We designed and built a new theme from scratch around old-town Skagway: Besley slab type like the false-front signs on Broadway, Newsreader for reading, and a palette of spruce, glacier-silt green, fireweed and brass. The masthead is a painted panorama of the town, with AB Mountain, the Dewey ridge, the false fronts and the tide flats, and it follows the real sky from National Weather Service and NOAA data: clouds, rain, snow, fog and blizzards drawn frame by frame, flags and trees that lean with the wind, and an inlet that rises and falls with the tide.
Then we replaced the borrowed parts with our own software. HD Membership sells print and online subscriptions, HD Comments runs a moderated community, HD Newsletters emails new stories, HD Engage keeps the reader list and mailing labels, HD Publications shows the visitor guide and HD Puzzles serves the daily puzzles, and all of them share one reader account. Every one of the paper’s 1,250-plus stories kept its original address, and old page-builder layouts are converted as they load, so the archive reads cleanly in the new design.
What changed
Uncached pages now build in about six-tenths of a second on the server, down from one to two seconds. 956 fraudulent and abandoned accounts are gone, comments are guarded by Cloudflare Turnstile and staff review, and there are no third-party embeds left on the page: the paper owns every feature it depends on.
Readers get one account for their subscription, delivery, saved stories, comments and newsletters. The newsroom posts stories, lists classifieds and publishes each year’s visitor guide without calling us, and the site is back on our managed hosting behind Cloudflare.
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