First of all, I apologize for the lack of updates in the last two weeks (for those of you who stayed faithful to my site, at least). I hope you’ll forgive me if I told you the last two weeks have been two of the busiest in my 22-and-a-half year life. It wasn’t just overhauling a news site; it also involved coordinating a 4-section Back-to-School edition that, by itself, is one of the more difficult editions to put out at Central Michigan Life.
But I don’t want to ramble too long, because the site I’ve been building for the last month is finally complete and up for everybody to see: http://www.cm-life.com.
If you are a frequent cm-life.com user, you can obviously see the changes, with the simple design and navigation. Scrolling is kept to a minimum. You can browse by subsections (i.e. football, money news, etc.). You can browse through five featured stories played at the top in a slideshow.
But here are some of my proudest additions:
- “What We’re Reading” – Publish2 is a collaborative journalism effort I’ve already talked about in a previous entry. If you look on the right-hand side of the site, you’ll see this section, with three of the lastest links I, or anyone else on staff, have posted. Basically, we want to give our readers our recommended Web links, which usually deal with issues that matter to students, whether it’s social networking or with paying for higher education.
- Facebook Fan Box – Kudos to the Mustang Daily for this idea. We want to increase our Facebook presence, so we installed a box which 1) shows select fans of our publication, and 2) makes it extremely easy to become a fan. Our hope from here is to build a big enough fan base so we can increase interaction with our readers.
- The Virtual Edition – Our old site would feature front-page PDF’s on the left-hand side. Now we can easily post our entire print edition (with advertising) on the site. It takes a little bit to load, especially on an older computer, but it comes out extremely nice for those who are patient. (Part of it is the 4-section BTS issue, so once we go down to 2 sections and 16 pages total, it’ll load much faster)
- Police Log – We’ve embedded Google Maps on our site to include the latest items in the CMU Police log. There isn’t too much on there now, but we’re getting it going. This is information that, I feel, is critical to some readers.
Of course, I am constantly looking for new ideas. So if you have any, let me know.
One of my biggest projects for this year is to develop a comprehensive author page that sheds better light on some of our writers and editors. Right now, they’re built to show each author’s bio, their e-mail link and their Twitter link (if they have one, and most aren’t put in yet).
Leave any feedback you can… like I said, I’m always looking for ideas, and asking my peers for it is one of the best ways to make something better. Thanks!
Posted by Brian Manzullo at August 20, 2009
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