CoPress

For years, both The Chronicle’s staff and our readers knew we had a pretty nasty Web site. But like most college newspapers back in 2007, we didn’t have a robust online department and we treated our site with a level of respect even Rodney Dangerfield would have been surprised to witness.

That all changed when we had a few important things happen at around the same time in early 2008. First, our then-editor, David Graham, recognized the need for a new Web presence. Midway through his editorship, I cold-emailed David to tell him that I really wanted to help The Chronicle make a new website. The next year’s editor, Chelsea Allison, immediately went to bat for us financially and logistically, and a task force of sorts was hatched — including a few top editors, some nerdy staff members and several developers we had managed to recruit.

To make short a 22-month long story, we ended up deciding after lots of debate and proposal reviews that we’d build our new site in-house — even with a generous Board of Directors ready to pay an outside firm. We’re glad we made that call because it was a completely unique learning experience for dozens of us, it ended up saving a ton of money at an important time and we made a Web site of which we and our readers can be proud. We released the site on Monday, Sept. 28, 2009.

Looking back at the last two years’ worth of work on this project, it’s becoming clearer to me what helped us along the way. I’m not going to go into why we made this design decision or use that video hosting service because I don’t think that will be as interesting or valuable as the following battle-tested strategies and tendencies. It’s these more general observations that will keep you on the right trajectory, in my opinion.

In short: if you’re just starting out, worry about planning now and pixel widths later. Here is some advice I hope you’ll take to heart:

Having a diverse advisory group is key

As I mentioned before, we had a task force composed of people from many areas of The Chronicle. Members included that year’s Editor and Sports Editor, the three core Online Department editors, a few more developers, an associate news editor, a photography editor and several adult members of our Board of Directors. Having all these people representing the interests and concerns of their respective departments meant that we didn’t overlook any major issues early in the planning stages. Also, because each department had a solid say in what we ended up building, it helped expedite the transition process from alpha to beta to official Web site with minimal pushback from staffers who liked the “old way” better.

In-person and long meetings are productive

Google Docs, email and weekly conference calls are great, but I’ve found that none is an effective substitute for a real-life meeting. We had three long meetings over the course of the development period: one to completely launch our blog network, one to create and decide on a general design for the Web site and one to discuss workflow. The meetings were hours long and were emotionally and mentally draining; things actually did get heated at times, which is healthy in a news hall. We left each time with an action plan and a bunch of confidence, and each meeting led to bursts of unparalleled productivity — which was especially important when we were in various corners of the country (and in some cases, the globe).

If the new one’s better, give it to the people

We could still label our site “beta” if we wanted. We released it with no newsletter feature, no RSS support, a few quirky archives problems, and a less-than-perfect photo uploading system on the back end. But our online readers have been unanimously supportive of the new site, even with those small annoyances, because on the whole, it’s much better than the old one. We solved three of those four problems in the first week and a half, and will release our newsletter feature very soon. Exactly zero of the many readers who gave us feedback chose to say something other than, “The new site is much better than the old one,” so even if you’re wary of releasing an unfinished product to the public, rest assured that as long as your site doesn’t crash and looks right in users’ browsers, you’ll be just fine. Your readers will thank you for giving them a much better experience even if it’s not perfect.

Combining technical and editorial wishes can be difficult

We’ve received hundreds of private emails in the past few years that basically say the same thing: your comment sections are offensive and unrepresentative of any sort of rational discussion. We wanted to do something to fix that with our new site. While our solution isn’t yet perfect (wherein all commenters must use a valid email address), it has decimated the number of offensive and inappropriate comments left on the site. Adding to its effectiveness was our realization that putting comments on a separate page (instead of right below the articles) would enable pages to load dozens of times faster and lower our hosting costs. You can marry the technical aspects and the editorial aspects of your project successfully, but sometimes it’s not so easy. For example, we custom-coded a module that allows readers to see date-specific front pages, which is a feature they enjoy but that caused us a lot of trouble at first. It can be difficult to ask someone to spend three weeks coding a feature when their services are needed elsewhere, but if your readers are going to expect something from you, try your hardest to deliver it.

Learn all you can about the power of Drupal

Dean Chen, the Lead Developer who coded our site, has some brief advice for those wishing to use Drupal. He encourages developers to learn the Drupal API and Drupal Coding Conventions from a book called Pro Drupal Development by VanDyk & Westgate. It’s a good idea to learn how to use and customize CCK, Panels and Views Modules, too. When it comes to browser testing, you can never test enough times. Check CSS and JS in all four major browsers (IE, Firefox, Chrome, Safari) to ensure that styles and behavior are consistent. Making sure there were no browser incompatibility issues was a major focus of ours as it directly affects the way our work is perceived and our users’ browsing experience. Optimizations such as memcache make a huge difference performance-wise and are a must. Lastly, test and back up the code base early and often, especially before and after performance optimizations are made.

Never rest when you’re in charge of a “living thing”

Not enough newspapers post corrections or updates to their stories online, and we were guilty of that, too. Now, though, we’ve worked out an easy protocol for going back to modify content. Making sure all multimedia content is as fresh as possible is also very important, but it can be hard to stay on top of. Having a new Web site to present to people is a wonderfully fulfilling feeling, but it’s certainly fleeting. We have many other things we want to do now that we have the site running well on a day-to-day basis. We want to explore text notifications and mobile news tips; we want to drive more traffic to our site with social media; we want to innovate with different types of advertisements.

My personal favorite potential project is a video hub where we’ll invite all members of the Duke Community (e.g. students, faculty, staff, alumns, local residents, etc.) to add their videos to our database. There are thousands of YouTube videos out there that are Duke-related, including recordings of improvisational comedy shows, live music and guest speakers. The official Duke News office produces many high-quality video features, as well. Students working on projects in their classes could add their videos to the database. A simple submission form would be available for people whose videos we didn’t find at first. We would become the go-to source for any video that had a Duke tie, and because we’d have all the meta-data that comes with a YouTube video, we’d have an excellent search function. Our designers would create a stunning interface that would make watching videos on our site more enjoyable. None of this has been specifically planned, but I believe it would be an excellent addition to our Web site and a useful resource for tons of people, from prospective students to aspiring Duke artists to alumns thirty years removed from Duke.

Alex Klein is a junior at Duke University where he serves as Online Editor of The Chronicle, an independent student-run newspaper. Follow Alex on Twitter at @alexklein or email him at alex.klein@duke.edu.