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.

Several of the points that came out of the session that are worth repeating:

• Plan in advance: From creating wireframes to deciding what you’re going to include it’s important to start from a solid base to prevent headaches down the road.
• Keep the design fresh: If your news organization is going to go through the effort of producing special content then make the online presentation reflective of how much work went into the section. Don’t just recycle a traditional story template; create something that highlights the content and topic of the feature. Think of feature sections as a way for your online staff to showcase what they can do.
• Showcase what’s important: If you’re producing multimedia content along with print stories for your feature make sure you emphasize these in an attractive way. Simply providing links to videos, photo galleries, interviews, etc. is not enough. Frequently multimedia aspects are the most eye-catching aspects of a story so it doesn’t serve your news organization very well to hide them away behind simple text links.
• Bring in extras: If you’re working at a small news organization and covering a much larger story don’t feel like you have to cover every aspect of it in your feature. As the saying goes: do what you do best and link to the rest. This will allow your staff to focus their time and energy on producing and designing stellar content for what you can cover.

There’s much more in the session which is embedded above with all the audio as well so check that out.

The session concluded this summer’s Web Design Camp but there will most likely be a session toward the end of the summer that covers what people accomplished with their summer projects. While the sessions are over we are still here to answer any and all design-related questions that come up during your work. If you’re stuck and need help head over to the forum or shoot an email to us.

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.

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.

Joey started the session by looking at some great examples of different thinking in homepage design. Much of the discussion centered around the approach that Newser takes. While Newser is an aggregator there are still aspects of its design that are important to keep in mind for college news sites as well.

• The importance of images - A user’s eye is going to be drawn to images; while Newser and other sites focus heavily upon photography info-graphics and illustrations can also be extremely helpful to lend some beauty to your homepage.
• Don’t overwhelm the user - Newser sticks to presenting a graphic and headline for each story. Excerpts are only visible by clicking on the story. While excerpts can be used well they ought to be custom-crafted (like Newser’s) and kept brief.

Joey also spent sometime discussing the homepage of the venerable New York Times. The homepage of the New York Times offered the best example of one of the things to be most cautious about when designing a homepage: do not try to make it remain exactly faithful to your print design. While similarities are okay, the conventions of the web must be understood when designing a homepage.

We also spent time discussing the homepage of various ongoing projects. The Daily Pennsylvanian is working on a new site this summer and there was agreement that they way they feature campus events on the homepage is a move in the right direction.

Also discussed was some early screenshots of the redesign that Jake and Ethan are working on for The Eagle. As part of this redesign they are planning on allowing the user to customize some of the content displayed.

On the slate for this Thursday at 5 pm Pacific is a session on designing article pages. Jake Paul will lead us through some of the things to think about in terms of typography, general design, and more. To find out more head over to the wiki or the forum. Interested in participating? You canRRSVP to the event on Facebook. Happy designing!

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.

Some notes on navigation practices that came up during the session:

• There was a lot of talk about breaking navigation into more topic-oriented menus. While this may be harder to accomplish for college papers that do not have a tremendous amount of content it is also something that more sites are moving toward. Some examples mentioned were The Spokesman Review and Newser.
• Also discussed was whether dynamic content like categories ought to be kept separate from the more static contact of a site (i.e. the About and Contact pages). While there was no consensus reached on this most believed that it was important to make the categories be the parts of the menu that are emphasized while the other pages of a site should be visible, but not as heavily emphasized.
• Also mentioned was the way in which Apple uses its footer to convey a tremendous amount of information. By creating what is essentially a sitemap there they provide dozens of links to helpful information to the visitor.
• The discussion also moved toward news aggregation. Lauren mentioned how the San Luis Obispo Tribune is aggregating local Twitter users. While nobody could think of any college news organizations utilizing aggregation it was generally agreed that this would be something cool to attempt.
• Other sites mentioned:
  • Lawrence Journal-World – mentioned by Daniel for the way in which it requires a user to click to display the drop-down menu.
  • Crosscut – as an example of an aggregator site.

That was just part of what was discussed during the session and you can read the full text of the chat as well. Here’s what I was able to record of video from the session.

The next session of the Summer Web Design Camp will be this upcoming Thursday June 11th and Joey Baker will be leading the session on homepage design. Likely to be covered are some radically different approaches to what you include and what is given focus. To read more about next week’s session head on over to the Facebook event and check out the links there. Also, we’d love to have you get started with the conversation in the forum.

As always you can RSVP at the Facebook event or send an email to us and we’ll fill you in with the details.

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!

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!