How we rebuilt the site for La Mañana, one of Uruguay's oldest newspapers, without betraying the hundred-plus years behind its name.
Some jobs are code, and some jobs are a responsibility. Rebuilding La Mañana's site was the second kind. It wasn't just another website: it was the masthead of a newspaper that started printing on July 1st, 1917, and which, through interruptions, silences and comebacks, still comes out more than a century later. When a project carries that kind of weight, the first technical decision is also one of respect: don't break anything that already survived this long.
The history
La Mañana was born as a soapbox. Pedro Manini Ríos and Héctor R. Gómez founded it in the thick of Batllista Uruguay, to argue with power from the press. In its pages it defended ideas that today are historic achievements, the ones that put Uruguay at the front of the region, like universal secret suffrage and the eight-hour workday. Behind those achievements was a modern idea of a country.
It was one of the great morning papers of 20th-century Uruguay, until, like so many print dailies, it stopped printing in the late nineties. It could have ended there, a collection of yellowed copies in a newspaper archive. But the brand went back to the family and the name went back onto the street: since 2019 La Mañana is published again, now digitally too. That "again, now digital" is exactly where a studio like ours comes in.
A senior newspaper doesn't get redesigned. It gets restored, modernized, and put back to work without the surgery showing. Working principle — Tamandua
The problem
The site existed, but it carried years of drag: duplicate categories, a slow search, a homepage with no hierarchy, fragile historic content, and a publishing flow that depended on touching the server by hand. None of that gets fixed by switching to a new theme. It gets fixed by opening up the mechanism with a watchmaker's care.
The starting stack was WordPress with Elementor. The brief we set for ourselves was clear: work on top of what's already alive, optimizing and improving along the way, without tearing anything down and keeping the service 100% up the whole time.
The work
Telling a project like a checklist strips it of its soul. But a newspaper is also built section by section, so we laid it out the same way: by fronts, each one solving a piece of the same problem — that a reader opens the site and feels like they're looking at a serious, fast, well-organized newspaper.
We cloned the real site into a staging environment with its own domain, so the client could see and approve every change before it touched the live site. The historic content migration was done carefully, keeping it 100% intact — nothing lost along the way, and none of the SEO earned over the years given up either.
Years of overlapping sections became a clear map: we merged Política and Actualidad into a single section, Información, regrouping 4,797 articles without losing a single one, and sorted Opinión into editorials, letters to the editor, and columns. Everything old still lands where it should, through 301 redirects, so not one link indexed since the site came back in 2019 breaks.
We redesigned the front page with a three-column hero, red rules #E30202 like a printed paper's, crisp vector logos, and hand-picked typography: IBM Plex Serif for headlines, Source Serif 4 for body text. Magazine-style cover treatment for the editorial piece, sections that reveal on scroll, tidy mega-menus. Visual weight where the news calls for it.
Nobody picks the hero's stories by hand: they start out rotating evenly, and as they rack up clicks the system starts favoring whichever ones actually work, giving them the slots with images. All visible from a dedicated panel in the editor.
Search used to take four seconds; we got it down to 1.1 by stripping a JOIN the query didn't need. We added cache purging on publish, so a new article shows up instantly in its section, and fixed the per-section RSS feeds so they stop getting stuck repeating the same stories.
The article editor gained a subtitle field and SEO/social metadata (Open Graph, Twitter), so every piece gets shared properly, using its dek as the summary when there's no other text. Small details that save whoever's writing some daily friction.
We set up a flow where a git push deploys itself: the staging server pulls every minute, rebuilds styles and purges caches. With guards against overwriting versioned files, and a protocol built for multiple developers working in parallel without stepping on each other. The boring infrastructure, the kind nobody sees, is what holds up everything else.
The roadmap
A hundred-year-old newspaper coming back also needs to be able to live off its readers. So the next, most ambitious frontier is a paywall with recurring subscriptions built for today's Uruguay, plus an e-Paper: the day's edition in an HTML5 viewer, with a back-issue library searchable by date and reserved for subscribers. It's the point where technology stops just holding up the newspaper and starts funding it too.
The close
You can build a news site in an afternoon. The hard part isn't standing up a website: it's taking a name that's been going out onto the street for over a century and bringing it back to the screen without losing the weight or the seriousness it earned in print.
That's what this project was about. Putting modern engineering — careful migrations, tuned queries, automatic deploys — in service of something that predates it by generations: the trade of telling people what happened, every morning.
■ Tamandua — Web development and infrastructure.
La Mañana · Uruguay · Ongoing project, 2026.
Founded in 1917. Never fully quiet.