CoPress

It’s the little things…

You’ve invariably heard the phrase turned before, whether speaking about life’s pleasures or why a product is popular. Often, it applies to products on the Web; “It’s the little things that make Gmail so good,” or, “Why does WordPress dominate as self-hosted software? It’s the little things.”

And that it is. WordPress is quickly becoming the go-to solution for those who want ease of operation combined with a full feature set and nearly limitless extendability. The software’s popularity, however, is also part of its downfall: because of an enthusiastic community that pumps out new themes every day, oftentimes the product’s back end capabilities do not match up with what is seen by the audience.

Luckily, it’s generally easy to modify themes that were not necessarily well thought out or executed. Whether by enabling a plugin or hacking some PHP, college news organizations can greatly increase the presentation and functionality of their sites with a minimum of time and effort. Before doing so, however, one needs ideas.

Thus, I present to you a number of small improvements for your WordPress-based news site (in no particular order).

• Multiple authors: While many publications note contributors within a story’s body copy, this one is a no-brainer for online presentation — especially because it can be achieved with nothing other than a plugin. Co-Authors Plus was modified from an existing plugin by Mo Jangda with the needs of college news organizations in mind.
• Author information/contact: With the social media revolution in full swing, news staff are no longer relegated to being a faceless name on newsprint. People maintain online personas on Facebook, Twitter and elsewhere, and you should highlight them to increase audience interaction. Listening to your users, after all, can only lead to improved content.
• AP date/time: An important but often overlooked feature of most (if not all) news Web sites is display of when content was updated. While there are PHP functions for displaying date and time in almost any format, theme designers have their own preferences. True to journalistic form, why not stick with the industry standard of displaying things in AP style? There’s even a plugin to assist you in doing so.
• Pull quotes: For designers users especially, the linear presentation of news content online is typically neither stimulating, attractive or extra informative. An easy way to help remedy this is to add a custom CSS style for pull quotes, allowing for emphasis through means other than those that can be added via pictures or standard HTML markup.
• Proper cutline/credit styling: Speaking of pictures, it’s an unfortunate reality that visual journalists often receive the short end of the stick when it comes to having their work integrated with a story. Whether their cutlines or credits are truncated or omitted, any loss of information degrades your coverage. Instead of allowing this to happen, make an effort to find a way to properly style cutlines and credits.
• Topical landing pages: We’ve discussed it before with regard to wikis, but topics on your site — whether based on a category, tag or otherwise — should have  landing pages that are logical to navigate and styled nicely. An unfortunate side effect of WordPress’ roots as a blogging engine make it so that many theme designers fail to account for anything but chronologically sorted excerpts of posts, but anyone who wants to get their feet wet with PHP should be able to overcome this.
• Identified link types: One Web trend that came about several years ago was the visual styling of links based on target or filetype. While the practice failed to endure, its use could be beneficial to your users if your content includes many links to sources (as it should). Best of all, the styling — while a simple procedure — can be achieved even more easily with some simple plugins.
• Print stylesheets: Some might consider it ironic in this day and age, but there are still times at which readers will want to print something from your Web site. To prepare for such a case, it’s a relatively easy exercise to create a stylesheet that will nicely present your content when output to a printer. Correcting for this eventuality will make sure your hard work is appreciated to the fullest extent regardless of what medium is used for transmission.

Perhaps the best thing about improvements like these is that they can be implemented one by one when your resources allow or when you are motivated to tinker a bit. The little things aren’t deal breakers for users if they don’t exist, but their presence will make visiting your organization’s site that much better.

Do you have additions to this list or have you taken the opportunity to enact some of these changes? If so, sound off in the comments or head to the forum!