We want to extend a very special congratulations to the College Heights Herald, winner of the best Publication Website among large schools.

Max Cutler, Web developer at the Yale Daily News and Courant News, recently started a forum topic about presenting multimedia on a student news site that we’ve been meaning to start a conversation around. The YDN recently launched a new landing page for their multimedia that offers a much more graphic view. What’s your reaction to how the page presents different type of media? Is it better to have content organized by topic or content type? What’s your ideal multimedia browsing experience? Weigh in on the thread!

• Alex Klein (@alexklein), online editor
• Dean Chen (@deanchen), lead developer
• Chase Olivieri (@chasefoto), multimedia editor

As you might have seen, Alex wrote a blog post for CoPress about their recent switch from College Publisher to Drupal. Here’s a summary of what we discussed in the podcast:

• Why they chose Drupal
• How the switch went
• How they’re building a Web staff
• Multimedia
• New commenting policy and their comment system

Listen in!

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.

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.

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.

Listen live as Online Manager Son Hunyh and others from the Daily’s staff discuss the redesign and their ideas and plans for this year, including tactics to increase readership engagement. Be sure to join our live text chat below and call in to give feedback.

If you’re not able to listen live, please add your question as a comment.

When: Sunday, Aug. 30 at 5 p.m. ET

Where: BlogTalkRadio (or listen here with the embedded player)

Call-in number: (347) 843-4589

• Needed: Real-Time Auction System for Citizen Media – An idea for a better way of compensating the “citizen journalists” who do on-the-spot reporting when an event happens. Sounds like a good business idea to me.
• For those following the Associated Press DRM conversation, there are two important articles which pretty well sum the entire thing up: “AP Launches Open Source Ascribenation Project,” by Doc Searls, and “Microformats, hNews, the AP and the Animals,” by Steve Yelvington. DRM aside, it will be really sweet if the hNews format is codified into something that’s adopted. There’s a lot of semantic data produced by newspapers that’s lost to the machines, and the markup for hNews is relatively simple to incorporate into your website if you can modify the template (open source for the win, by the way).
• Brian Manzullo of Central Michigan Life has started redesigning their website in preparation for an August 20 launch (disclosure: we’re giving a bit of help). It’s worth paying attention, however, because I think he’s going to learn a number of sharable lessons along the way. Check out discussions in the forum about navigational menus and revamping CM Life’s website logo.
• What an AP alternative could look like – A source of material for people to mix, match, and create news packages. An iStockPhoto for news content. This could be useful on the collegiate level as well.
• If you aren’t subscribed already, Rebooting the News is a highly recommended listen. In the most recent podcast, Jay Rosen and Dave Winer cover personalized suggested user lists for Twitter and the expand upon the idea of a virtual assignment desk. If we can meet our delivery timeline (knock on wood), I’m optimistic that the Edit Flow Project will provide a solid foundation for crowdsourcing story assignments.

On the wiki, we now have a really decent editorial strategy thanks to Megan Taylor. We’ll be building our content there over the next month as well as (hopefully) skinning the wiki in alignment with our website relaunch. The goal for the wiki is to have the community take ownership over editorial quality; we’re looking for page editors for each of the topic tubs. If you think you might fit the bill, let us know!

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 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!