Taking a newspaper online
joelnewcomer (34 points) | Fri, 2005-12-16 19:20Hey everyone, my company is about to hire a web development company to take our weekly newspaper online. Our newspaper's niche is coverinng community news very well and doing it in beautifully-designed, full-color newsprint pages. We also publish some award-winning magazines that are inserted in the paper periodically. I am embarrassed to admit that to this point we haven't taken our newspaper content onto the web. This coming Thursday (Dec 22) we are meeting with 2 different companies to discuss a website solution. We design our ads and layout in Adobe InDesign CS2. I don't know a whole lot about web design so I am hoping to draw on the immense knowledge of the professionals on this site to get suggestions for good questions about publishing and hosting news content on the web. Any input would be greatly appreciated! Suggestions for bells and whistles would be cool too. Thanks!
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Just a quick question on whether you have a set of predefined styles set up for the content. I'm assuming as part of your workflow that you do. InDesign should be able to handle the translation of those styles in similar conventions for your website so the hierarchy of information should be retained.
Are you intending to update the site at set intervals..such as the day after the print publication or will there be continous updating of community news? If it is at intervals, then it should be easy enough do do an export of prestyled pages from indesign and upload them in one session to the site. Hvaing a good structure to place the pages into and link them for easy access is key. One of your workflows would have to be image processing to crush the print sized pics down to a reasonable size for web viewing. There are literally hundreds of ways you can do this but the tricky part is integrating the images into your articles or stories in the same fashion as they appear on the website. I've advise you to pick a national paper one day and look at a particular story. Then look at the story on their site. Have they just kept the lead picture? Have they edited the text for easy digestion online?
A relative of mine went through the same process but with a portal serving local papers rather than a dedicated site. I would say it wasn't 100% sucessful but that was more to do with the portal site than the paper.
Consider the fact that the online portion of your paper will take an awful lot of resources to maintain in a good fashion. Neglecting an online presence due to print pressures or vice versa has an adverse effect on peoples perception of your business. I used to meet a lot of people who treated their company website like electricity..quietly humming away in the background doing it's work . In reality it's more like a new baby. Lots of new responsibility and a huge amount of planning required to get anywhere with it.
afterglow.ie - Icons, interfaces, illustration
Yes, we do use styles heavily for our paper...they aren't very organized but they should work well if we can figure out how to get them from InDesign to html or CSS or whatever. I believe that we will be updating the site each week after the paper goes to press. It goes to press on Wednesday nights and is in people's hands on Friday, so Thursday (our slow day) will work great for this. I actually checked out the EPpy awards (Editor & Publisher) to see what news sites had won awards. I'm not extremely impressed with any of them, but I got some good ideas. I guess most news sites aren't very pretty. None of us are web designers, so I guess we will be at the mercy of whatever company we go with. I would rather have a fuctional website than a pretty site though. I am hoping we can implement RSS feeds...doesn't seem like it should be hard to do.
Whichever Web company you go with should have these solutions for you. They'll tell you what they need from you or tell you how to go about this.
You'll no doubt have to build the site on top of a database, and there are a lot of things to take into consideration when doing so.
The best advice I can offer is make sure you ask them a LOT of questions like how you or they will maintain the site, how will it be updated, etc...
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You definitely need a very good Contenet Management System (CMS) that is easy to use and allows you to update the site by you or your team. Also, make sure those dynamic pages are searchable by search engines.
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