Most importantly, we made the move to open source software. We ended our contract with College Publisher and are now powered by WordPress, with hosting support from CoPress. With the switch we can control our domain name and have much more flexibility overall in shaping how we want our site to look and function, which is really what we were after in wanting to redo the site.

Keeping in mind that any theme we chose for our site upgrade would be much better than what our CP site was at that point able to offer, we chose News Evolved, created by CoPress Hosting Associate Andrew Spittle. Throughout the launch process, Andrew was instrumental in shaping the theme to suit our needs. What we liked about it:

• It’s different: With features such as Dim the Lights and customized section landing pages, News Evolved is fresh and bold. Plus, no one (to our knowledge) has used it yet because the theme has been in development up to this point. Originality is always a plus in our book.
• Customizability: While most WordPress themes can be modified to various degrees, we appreciated the lengths to which News Evolved could be changed. The homepage was created in such a way that we were able to add and take away features that did or did not work for us. Additionally, we were able to choose which layout we wanted for the section landing pages and what content would display on the sidebars. This variety should encourage readers to browse the site more than they might otherwise.
• Hierarchy of content: The main homepage features seven stories without having to scroll, and with a clear delineation; that is, the three rotating stories are the most important and have powerful images. Plus, the category pages also highlight the most important story. In the features and sports sections, we were able to create subheads that easily distinguish both arts and health-related content, while news appropriately lists our most recently updated content.
• No ads: The homepage is free of ads, letting our content take center stage — something that we hope our readers will appreciate. Ads were built into the category landing pages to ensure we still have a mechanism for generating revenue from the site.
• Displays social networks: Our social networks are put front and center on the homepage. On CP, we installed links to our YouTube and Twitter pages on the antiquated CP4 lefthand sidebar, and that was about it. Now, we have prominent links for our Twitter, Publish2 and Flickr accounts, all of which allow readers to keep up to date with the latest of what we’re up to. Thy are visually pleasing and easily accessible in their location right below the homepage slideshow.

In addition to our social networks, we worked with Andrew to install a tag cloud so that readers looking for a specific topic can click on a tag and find all relevant articles and content. (On that note, creating specific landing pages customized for particular topics that we cover regularly is a goal for the future.) Knowing what we know about who usually reads college news sites, our print editions are also available for perusal by readers who might not frequent the Mills campus. Our mechanism for listing events also got an upgrade. On College Publisher, our events calendar was confusing to both use and look at; now, we can easily sync a Google calendar to display events relevant to our community.

A few other goals for the Web site include building an in-site feature to submit letters to the editor and developing a comprehensive archive system so readers can find content uploaded within a specific week, month or year. We’re also receptive to feedback we get from readers; we want to implement those features which in the end help our community to interact with one another and foster a deeper understanding of those issues which affect them. As a small news organization, we are really only limited by the reaches of our technical expertise and constraints of a constantly fluctuating staff. WordPress, as a relatively easy to understand CMS, helps in both regards, as does working with CoPress, an organization of student journalists just like ourselves who are on the forefront of innovation in the field.

Jennifer Courtney is the Editor in Chief of The Campanil, an independent student news organization at Mills College in Oakland, Calif. Follow Jennifer on Twitter at @jlcourtney or email her at eic@thecampanil.com.

Earlier this summer, Student Life, the independent newspaper of Washington University in St. Louis, relaunched its Web site using WordPress µ. The new site is the culmination of several months of conversations within Student Life’s Web team and a summer of intense design and programming. More importantly, the July launch was the first time that Student Life’s Web site was completely student-run since joining College Publisher in 2001 (long before it became the College Media Network).

Our decision to leave CMN and College Publisher 5.0 stemmed from a desire to gain finer control over users’ experience in interacting with our Web site and to open to door for future Web development projects. We had been having discussions for several years about the possibility of building our own site, but the final decision to leave CMN was made last spring after a rocky experience with CP5 and the growth of our Web staff to a size that we thought could sustain the design and development of a new site into the future.

The Process

As we started to look for a content management system to power our new site, we evaluated three basic options: using WordPress (WordPress µ), Drupal or building our own content management system in Django. At the end of the day, we chose to go with the WP option because several members of our interactive staff had worked with it in the past and because the system offered an easy way of running our main site and all of our blogs within one installation. Although Drupal is also extremely powerful, we found that WordPress’s interface was better suited to a workflow that would begin to allow non-technical reporters and editors to work within our CMS. We haven’t dropped the long-term plan of moving to a Django-powered system, but the development cycle for creating a system that would completely suit our needs would have taken far longer than the time we allotted for our Web transition.

From the beginning of the development process, our online staff was committed to designing its own theme (rather than using one freely or commercially available from an external source) because we wanted to avoid the trap of looking exactly like a lot of other papers. Although many of the themes available on the Internet are smooth and user-friendly, we wanted to avoid fading into a sea of similarly designed Web sites (one of the biggest drawbacks with CP4) and we wanted the opportunity to highlight the talents of our staff members. Our design process started with a conversation about what kind of information we wanted to highlight on the front page and how we envisioned our online workflow. We worked from there.

The Challenges

Although there was a good sense of how the Web site would look when we launched, a lot of the most important work on the site has happened since then. Just this week, a project spearheaded by our online editor Scott Bressler went live, allowing us to easily drag and drop articles within our eight above-the-fold story slots (in the JavaScript-based carousel element and the latest news rail). We have gone through countless revisions of our style sheet based on feedback from our staff and readers. Every day, we spend time going through server resource reports to find modules that load slowly so we can reduce server demand and speed up the load time of our site. One of the biggest challenges of running our own site is that the development is never done — we always have new projects to complete. That is also the greatest upside to our new site (and why we decided to switch in the first place): our online presence is now dynamic and constantly changing. With enough time spent writing, testing and debugging code, we can accomplish whatever we want without any external limitations.

One of the biggest challenges that we faced was trying to find an effective method for distributing our e-mail edition. A significant percentage of our traffic (especially among parents and alumni) is driven by the e-mail edition, so one of our highest priorities for the site was finding a service that would allow us to reliably place messages in users’ inboxes. After researching a number of options including using some kind of script run off our servers and a number of paid services, we decided to go with MadMimi.com which seemed to have the best balance of price and features. In the weeks that we’ve been using MadMimi, we have yet to encounter a problem, having been able to take advantage of their top-notch support staff (which responds to questions by e-mail at all hours). Most importantly, we can finally track readership statistics for clickthrough and open rates. It has been very helpful to map out what stories cause readers to open the e-mail edition most frequently and what types of headlines get the highest number of clicks.

The Takeaways

Looking back on the process of leaving College Publisher, the best advice I can give to other papers is think big and think early. Use as many resources as are at your disposal; your online staff and Google are great places to start, but contacting students in your local computer science department and support networks like CoPress and the Center for Innovation in College Media can really make a difference. Brainstorming is an important part of the development process, but don’t let brainstorming interfere with your ability to get stuff done. In other words, your Web site will always be a work in progress, so launch it and go from there. Finally, if you are leaving College Publisher, leave plenty of time for getting your archives from them and don’t be afraid to call every day until you get what you want. The single biggest frustration of coordinating Student Life’s web development was finalizing our departure from CMN and obtaining our content exports and, more importantly, our user exports. That data belongs to you and there is no reason you should need to wait for it.

Above all else, don’t be scared off by the sea of computer programming acronyms and matrix-like walls of code — trust the news judgment that gets the print edition out every day and the technical side of Web development will follow.

A Rundown of the New Site

• CMS: WordPress µ
• Theme: Designed in-house
• Hosting: MediaTemple, (gs) plan
• E-mail edition: Powered by MadMimi
• Favorite plugins: Yet Another Related Posts Plugin and WP-Stats
• Ad rotation: Google AdManager, sold by student staff with remnants sold by Google AdSense

Sam Guzik is currently the Director of New Media and a former Editor in Chief of Student Life Newspaper at Washington University in St. Louis. He can be reached at sam.guzik@studlife.com and is happy to answer any questions about the process of transition to a new Web site.

After three months of hard work, the Minnesota Daily has a brand new design to improve its layout and usability. Son Huynh gives us his take on theming Drupal, changing a paper’s workflow and reorganizing news content.

In addition, just last March, the Minnesota Daily teamed up with developers from NewsCloud to create a Facebook application as part of a not-for-profit research study sponsored by the Knight Foundation to find new ways of engaging young people in news readership and community engagement. As an incentive, the Minnesota Daily hosts challenges and implemented a point system to reward active readers with prizes for their participation (such as posting on the Facebook page, tweeting, following the paper on Twitter).

Son also talks about the challenges of building an online community around the paper and his plans to revamp the app by adding Facebook Connect, so users can access the paper while being logged on to Facebook, and a selection on the paper’s site to better connect student groups and campus events. The newest version of the Minnesota Daily is set to launch on Sept 8th. Be sure to check out the new multimedia section, which was in part inspired by the Onion.

Have feedback for the Minnesota Daily? Leave a comment or email Son at shuynh [at] mndaily [dot] com.

CM Life

Brian Manzullo, Editor in Chief

After a summer-long process of transitioning from College Publisher and building a new design, Central Michigan Life launched its new WordPress-powered site on Aug. 20. One aim for this site was to create a more simple, clutter-free look that was visually appealing but also straightforward enough that readers don’t have headaches trying to find what they’re looking for. Our photos and social networking elements are more prominent and the different story subtopics that people might want to follow exclusively are visible (e.g. football, money). Most of all, though, we wanted freedom with our Web site. We have control of all advertising and all of the different elements on our site, meaning we can try new things quite easily if we wish. My hope, however, is that we don’t stop with the makeover. The real goal is to keep readers engaged with our online presentation, whether it is through live chats, Twitter, Facebook or story comments. We feel that we can better connect them to issues that matter, and we will work hard to utilize our site in doing so.

Daily Titan

Chris Ullyott, Webmaster

We launched our new Web site, www.dailytitan.com, on Aug. 10. It was a task to learn WordPress from the very beginning but, in short order, we began to see how the theming system worked and were able to successfully make fundamental changes to the software. With the help of the nice people at CoPress, brilliant plugins, and some elbow grease, we were able to customize our WordPress theme to suit the specific needs of both our editorial and advertising staffs. Now we have a much more attractive, intuitive, and useful online presence.

The biggest advantage over our previous system is the amount control we now have over both the visual and technical aspects of our site. We now have complete control over:

• Roles and privileges of staff user accounts for a better workflow
• Sizes and placement of advertisements for more revenue opportunities
• Distribution of content with RSS feeds, accommodating for breaking news
• Integration of third-party services like Twitter and ISSUU
• Linkage throughout the site for a better user experience

We can see major opportunities for university media using open-source content management systems. The amount of control one can have takes a little getting used to! However, WordPress is fairly simple to learn, and any committed media student can quickly learn the HTML, CSS and PHP coding techniques needed to make improvements to a WordPress theme without re-inventing the wheel.

Currently on our site, we’re particularly proud of the “stay connected” widget bar we added, which lets users immediately connect with our social media presence and use other distribution channels like podcasts and email subscriptions. We also can’t get over how cool our new media kit is, courtesy of our talented design staff. The Issuu viewer makes the presentation sing.

The custom navigation bars proved a fruitful project for us as well. By rewriting the header navigation code with plain old HTML and CSS, we strictly separated editorial from advertising content and gave special pages more appropriate homes. Users clearly now have it easier in finding what they need. Since we launched, our bounce rate has dropped a whopping 30%.

We have already received very positive response both in online traffic and personal comments. We look forward to seeing what our experience will be like once the school semester starts this year. New additions we’re working on include section forums, dining and housing guides, creative online use of editorial columns, and integration of a gutsy “furlough edition”…

Thanks to CoPress for all of your help. Let’s show our campuses what news is really all about!

UA Traveler

Jon Schleuss, Web Developer

It’s better to teach someone a skill rather than do a task for them. Our move to WordPress allows for more control by the individual students rather than lumping the responsibilities onto one Web guru. Choosing the Gazette theme, we followed similar steps taken by the Mustang Daily and implemented a custom header logo different from our print edition to make a distinction between our products. This year’s staff includes students focused on the print edition and others focused on the Web. That’s not to say the content doesn’t intermingle, however. We’re now prioritizing content based on the delivery method. Moving forward, we’re strategizing an innovation of Web advertising and diversifying our Web delivery methods. Expect a mobile version of our new site and one that’s delivered in an e-mail sent each week.

Guests: Lauren Rabaino, Web Editor and Marlize van Romburgh, Editor in Chief of The Mustang Daily

Summary: Lauren Rabaino and Marlize Van Romburgh swap stories with Greg and Emily as the four discuss each of their college newspapers transitions to WordPress.

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

It all began last summer, when we came up with an idea for a startup company: an online publishing platform for college news organizations. We wanted to be a better alternative to College Publisher – a content management system for college news organizations designed by college news organizations.

They’ve built a CMS, we’ve gone the community organizing route. Because we consider CoPress platform agnostic, it will be interesting to see how our paths intersect.

Guests: Steve Contorno, former editor in chief of the University of Illinois’s The Daily Illini and Zach Valentire, the Webmaster of the Minnesota Daily. Dreier Carr, the photo editor of The Technician at North Carolina State.

Summary: Greg and Emily discuss the power of Drupal and the creation of The Daily Illini‘s own CMS on Drupal with Contorno. The former Editor in Chief continues the conversation by passing on tips to college publications considering Drupal. Valentire and Carr discuss the popularity of Drupal and how it’s no longer something you can ignore. The three editors analyze how the switch can be made, how Drupal can be incorporated into your college newspaper’s workflow, and each of their staffs’ responses to the switch.

Related blog post: A Brand New Drupally Daily Illini

Subscribe: iTunes | RSS

Website Design

We went with the Gazette Edition from WooThemes because it gave us all the basic capabilities we were looking for:

• Prominent ads
• Wigetized sidebar
• Slick, rotating slideshow
• Auto-generated thumbnails

Advertising

During a time when revenue is falling, having full control over priority ad space is a must. We have a top banner (468 x 60 pixels), a sidebar ad (300 x 250 pixels) and up to four square ads on the lower sidebar (125 x 125 pixels).

We installed a WordPress plugin that allows for a “page peel” style advertisement in the top corner of the site. Although probably annoying to some, people like playing with it.

Plugins Used

The following plugins give us functionality that College Publisher would never allow for (or at least not easily).

Twitter Tools lets us easily post new articles and tweets straight from the admin end of WordPress. Why this is great: We don’t have to give every reporter the Twitter password and it streamlines the process of tweeting a new article. Posting links to articles is acceptable in moderation and when it’s supplemented with plenty of converstaion.

WP-Touch generates a mobile version of our site. If you don’t have a smart phone, you might not care, but this fall at Cal Poly, six hundred students on campus used iPhones — 500 more than in the spring, according to Ryan Matteson, the university’s technical security officer. My point: mobile is on the rise.

Another mobile plugin we’re excited about is for the non-smart phone users who want to get SMS updates. SMS Text Message is a plug we’re excited about, but have yet to use. It allows users to subscribe for text message alerts and lets us send out those alerts from the dashboard.

We’re using the Add to Any plugin for users to share our content over any social network. Although Share This is more widely recognizing for sharing, I chose Add to Any because it lets us customize the look of the button.

Structural Changes to the Daily

On a CICM post, I briefly mentioned the structural changes that came with the switch. To elaborate, this is how our workflow will function from here on out:

• Reporters save their articles as a WordPress draft (instead of e-mailing articles to editors)
• The reporter contacts copy editors when the article is in the CMS, copy editors will edit from the newroom or home (wherever they happen to be)
• We’ve hired an additional copy editor and switched up the shifts so there is always a copy editor on-call during the day
• There is an ongoing Google Spreadsheet of most recent articles posted. After editing the article, the copy editor signs off on the article on the spreadsheet
• The third editor to read over the story pushes “publish” if they think it’s ready. If it still needs work, it can go through the process again
• In the evening, designers pull already-edited articles from WordPress for page layout

The delay time between when a reporter writes the article and the editor posts it is about four hours. Right now, it’s not to efficient because our reporters are new (and therefore their articles need much editing) and the workflow is still slow. It will only get better from here.

The Back End

The hierarchy is broken down as such:

• Three administrators (not including CoPress) who have full access to all features
• About ten editors who can publish articles
• Ten contributors (reporters) who can save drafts, but not publish

New Features

Although we certainly didn’t need WordPress to implement the following new features to our website, having WordPress has made it way easier to execute these ideas we’ve had:

• Crime map: WordPress pages make adding new, easily-accessible features very easy. Within a few minutes, we were able to throw together a Google Map of the police log that we plan to update daily.
• Hot topics: We’ve always wanted to re-ignite an old feature called “What’s the Buzz?” but creating and maintaining pages was always a headache. Again, within minutes we were able to generate pages around controversial issues on our campus. Eventually, we’ll have a wiki to supplement each topic.

What’s Next?

Now that the process of posting is more streamlined (or, it’s getting there), the goal is to produce better multimedia. My efforts can be focused on training reporters one-on-one instead of copying and pasting articles at the end of the night.

You’ll notice immediately on the home page some of the new features we have introduced. The goal was to provide more entry points to our content, something we felt our old site failed to accomplish. The “What’s new” box highlights the latest information and will update as soon as new content is posted on the site. Additionally, the ticker at the top provides links to other recent stories, giving you easier access to the most up-to-the-minute news.

On the right-hand bar, you can find stories that your fellow readers are looking at, commenting on or recommending to help you decide what the most interesting news of the day might be. Scroll down, and you’ll notice our multimedia has been beefed up as well, something you should see throughout the site. Not to jump ahead, but the multimedia page itself is filled with interesting stories told in non-traditional ways. We hope you enjoy the videos, photo galleriesand audio slideshows presented in a much friendlier manner.

Our individual section pages are broken down much the same as before — News, Sports,Opinions, Diversions — however, the pages themselves are completely revamped. Not only are they better organized to look like individual home pages, but they are also divided by content in the tabs at the top. So if you’re hoping to find the most recent UI news, click the campus tab. Looking for the latest info on Illini basketball team? Go to the men’s basketball tab. All our content throughout the site is sorted how we think you’ll most easily find it.

All and all, these are what seem to be pretty cool updates (I can see that Albert has already asked about newsletter software). +1 for having a development blog too.