CoPress

This past Thursday was the last session of the summer for the Design Camp. Jackie Hai from the Amherst Wire led Daniel, Joey, Lauren, Greg, Kevin Koehler, Ben Leis, and myself through some of the different considerations that go into designing pages for special features.

If you’re not familiar with Jackie and the work of the Amherst Wire then it’s definitely worth checking out the work they have done for special features.

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This last Thursday’s session of the Summer Web Design Camp was all about what goes into creating, designing, and coding a news wiki. Daniel and Will led Lauren Rabaino, Max Cutler, Mo Jangda, Greg Linch, and myself through a discussion of how to set up and effectively deploy a news wiki.

Like last week the session started off with Daniel and Will leading us through a presentation that they put together covering examples, code, and options. The slideshow’s embedded above and is also available on Slideshare. Some of the main points that came out of the presentation were:

• Examples are hard to come by – The best source of examples are news organizations topical landing pages. While not “wikified” topical landing pages from The New York Times and The Guardian are good examples of what could be included on a page that the community has access to.
• Integration is key – For a news wiki to truly be effective it needs to be more than just a sidebar to the main news site. Information from the wiki must be integrated into the content of the “regular” site. For an example of this integration check out what Will’s doing with The Maine Campus.
• Experiment! – The field for news wikis is wide open. It can become whatever your news organization wants or needs it to be. Using a news wiki for topical landing pages, a restaurant section, or even as a way to review professors are all options that could be experimented with.
• Give the community ownership – A lot of concern over who will maintain and edit a wiki comes up when they’re discussed. One approach to this that was discussed during the session was to be upfront with your news community about what you think they can add to the wiki. Show that you value their input, knowledge, and perspective and perhaps they will in turn show an appreciation for the content on the wiki. People generally care about things that they have stake in.
• There’s many options – Creating a news wiki does not mean that you have to dive into setting up MediaWiki. There’s other options out there that have their own advantages and disadvantages. The end of Daniel and Will’s presentation covers a few of these alternative tools.

There were also a couple WordPress plugins discussed that could prove to be quite handy to those of you interested in creating a news wiki for your news organization. Will mentioned  the WP mobile edition as a way to create a mobile version of your site that won’t cause long page load times.

Also discussed was the Automatic Tag Link plugin which will automate the process of linking to tag pages. If you’re using tags as topical landing pages with a wiki this could be a good way to drive traffic to them and promote them.

We’ll be taking a break from the design camp sessions this week so that everyone can enjoy the 4th of July weekend and we’ll resume sessions on July 9th. The working plan for that session is to cover designing featured pages like how the Amherst Wire covered the Economic Stimulus. If you’re interested in participating stay tuned to this space or send us an email.

On the slate for this week’s session of the summer web design camp was article pages and different approaches to designing them. Thursday I sat down with Daniel, Jake Paul, and Ethan Klapper to talk over some of our favorite practices. Rick Martinez also joined us mid-way to add a fifth voice to the conversation.

To start things off Jake lead us all through a presentation, which we’ve posted on Slideshare, he had made that hit on some of the main points about article pages. A couple of the main points of that presentation were:

• Hierarchy – it’s important to create a clearly distinguishable hierarchy of elements on the page. This needs to be more than just the headline and body text though, it applies to all page elements. Even after scrolling most of the way down a page a reader should still be able to clearly pick out the body text as the defining page element.
• Minimize distractions – the whole point of visiting an article page is to read: don’t make this difficult for your readers. Ads, comments, sharing buttons, etc. are all great to have on an article page, but they should by no means detract from the content that you publish. If it’s too hard to read articles on your site then users will resort to either reading your articles through RSS or not reading them at all.
• Large fonts – 11 point Helvetica may work great for some sites but for long form reading it’s just not ideal. Keep the fonts large and you won’t strain the eyes of your readers.

From there the discussion proceeded to cover some of our favourite and not so favourite article designs. The slideshow linked above contains screenshots of all the sites discussed so that you can follow along with what we were talking about. There’s some good information in there and some of the sites critiqued are The Mustang Daily, The Daily Pennsylvanian, Seed Magazine, The Nation, The New York Times, and more.

This week we’ll be covering a topic that has been discussed quite a bit: integrating a wiki into your news organization website. Daniel and Will Davis will be leading the session and will be giving us some ideas and tips about how to set up and integrate a wiki. If you’re interested in participating you can RSVP to the Facebook event, read more at the wiki and get started drafting a “wiki wish list” in the Forum.

On the schedule this past week for the Summer Web Design Camp was ideas for radically redesigning homepages. Joey Baker led Jake Paul, Lauren Rabaino, Emily Babay, Ethan Klapper, Ben Leis, and myself participated in a discussion of some varying approaches to homepage design. You can watch a recording of the session over on Blip.

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Last Thursday was the second session of the Summer Web Design Camp and after some technical difficulties Jake Paul, Will Davis,Lauren, Daniel, Mo Jangda, and myself discussed navigation menus and what could be done to drastically change them.

The session started off with a quick demo of creating drop-down menus in WordPress and the files involved are all available for download. From there we started discussing the different ways in which sites handle navigation and what we all liked and disliked about the various approaches. Unfortunately I wasn’t able to record all of this discussion because of some technical problems with my laptop, but I’ve included what I have at the bottom of this post as well as the text from the Skype chat.

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This past Thursday I sat down with Jake Paul and Ethan Klapper of the American University Eagle, Jessica Luthi of City College of San Francisco’s The Guardsman, David Estes of The Daily UW, and Emily Babay of The Daily Pennsylvanian for the first session of the 2009 College Web Design Camp.

The call was largely audio, which is posted at the bottom of the post, and covered introductions to everyone’s sites and summer projects. Below are some highlights:

• While The Guardsman recently got a makeover with a slick WordPress theme, they will be working this summer to streamline the site and refine the design. Also in the works there will be a greater emphasis on incorporating multimedia into the site and articles.
• Jake and Ethan will be switching The Eagle from College Publisher 4 to Expression Engine and will be launching with a new design in the fall.
• David will be writing an iPhone app for the Daily UW, which also received a recent redesign. The app will provide a way for readers to contribute content, whether that’s photos, links, or writing and will also provide some location-based services like a restaurant guide.
• Emily, along with Dan Getelman who wasn’t able to make the session, will be moving The Daily Pennsylvanian from College Publisher to WordPress Drupal and will be soft launching the site this summer with a fresh face. They will also be working on revamping the campus events section, which will be heavily promoted this fall.

Also covered was a quick introduction to the role that the Society for News Design will be playing this summer. SND has graciously agreed to have a representative present at as many sessions as possible to give a professional perspective on the weekly subject. They’ll be able to put some of the ideas and techniques presented in the context of what they have seen attempted, and more importantly what has succeeded or failed. SND President Matt Mansfield will be joining us in Thursday’s session and will provide some further information on the role of SND.

Overall, the session was really interesting and it’ll be a lot of fun seeing how all of these projects develop over the summer. The camp also looks like it will be featuring people from a variety of platforms and newsroom sizes so there will be a little of everything. If you’re interested in seeing how some of these ideas may be applied to your newsroom and summer design project(s), come join us!

This week’s session on Thursday at 5 pm PT will be covering navigation techniques. I’ll be showing how to do drop-down menus in WordPress and will also cover some examples and best practices for site-wide navigation. We’ve started a discussion thread on the forum to get the conversation going. A preliminary agenda is posted over on the CoPress Wiki. If you’re interested in participating, you can RSVP on Facebook Event or contact us. Happy designing!

 

 Standard Podcast [19:27m]: Play Now | Play in Popup | Download (47)

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?

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