CoPress

If you’ve been keeping watch in the forum lately you may have seen some talk about a College Web Design Camp for student newspapers. I posted some preliminary information on the wiki a couple days ago and this is a more formal introduction to the idea.

The main goals

Our goal is to create an environment within which college news organizations, web developers, and editors can come together to collaborate and exchange ideas about their summer website design projects.

An inherent problem that college news organizations have to deal with is the high rates of staff turnover every four years. This means that some years the tech/web staff is robust and at others it is scarce. By providing virtual space in which everyone can exchange code, ideas, and projects we are hoping that everyone will gain web development skills that can be passed on down to future staff members.

Finally, in the spirit of transparency and collaboration, all training sessions and demos will be recorded and posted online. This will provide examples of all the code used in the sessions so that anyone can download and implement the ideas presented.

The first collaboration session

The first session will be held on May 28th at 5:00 p.m. PT. It will serve as an introduction for everyone to the project and to each other’s sites. We’ll seek to answer some of the questions below:

• What does your site look like now and what are the main goals that you hope to achieve during the summer?
• What skills does everyone have? Are you ridiculously good at creating gorgeous drop-down menus in WordPress? If so, then perhaps you’d be interested in leading a session for everyone.
• What have you found to be some of the biggest obstacles to successful college web development to be? What would have helped you along the way?

From there I’ll draft up a more detailed list of the sessions involved and who will be leading them. Keep reading for a list of what I’m hoping to cover!

What will be covered

A lot of the material will depend upon who participates, so if you see something in the list below that you’re an expert in then let us know in the forum. Below is a rough list of what we’ve come up with thus far:

• Navigation menus
• Creating category/topical landing pages
• Creating a radical homepage design that focuses on the community’s social activity
• Incorporating a wiki into the site
• Incorporating a forum into a site
• All about typography (how do you create a consistent feel?)
• Article pages (where do you put ads? serif or sans-serif?)
• Working with CSS3 techniques and how they can help you

These will be more than just how-to sessions though. When we cover navigation menus, we will spend time critiquing the existing menus of everyone involved so that you can get a feel for what others like or dislike about you existing design.

In addition to the involvement of student developers around the country, we’re planning on having a few professionals join the camp too.

Sign up

The schedule for these sessions is tentatively set to begin on May 28th and to run every week through early to mid-July. This will give all involved a half dozen tips, tricks, and opinions to take with them as they finish their design projects throughout the rest of the summer.

Made it all the way through that and still interested? There are two things you need to do. First, sign up for the entire series via our online form. Second, RSVP for the first session on Facebook. Depending on the interest, we may have double up sessions or limit the number of participants.

Get ready for a fun summer of happy designing!