How Should a College Newspaper Publish on the Web?
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I graduated high school many years ago, and first got online in 1992. The Internet was there, but not the World Wide Web at that point. I wrote a series of articles for the newspaper at my university about the Internet. Chris wrote me with a question about his college newspaper, and getting it online. Specifically, he is confused about them needing something simple to update with an easy interface. The reason is, they won’t always have a tech guy around. Chris feels that buying their own domain name is just too much for them, and they aren’t happy with the free WordPress package, as they don’t like the templates. Additionally, they have almost no budget. So, he turned to me for help.
I will agree that the templates available for WP aren’t very much to your liking. If you like WordPress itself, spend just a little bit of money and buy a more professional one. I’m sure you have some kind of campus IT department. They could host the site for you. You may be able to approach a local business and get hosting from them, maybe in exchange for free advertising. With WordPress, you can find a good template that will allow you to make it look very much like the professional online papers.
Any money you might have to spend would be quickly offset with advertising, local businesses, or even time donated by other students to help. The sooner you can get the paper into a system that will work for them and grow with them, the better.
A blog is just one level. Unfortunately, there aren’t that many social features in WordPress. There’s no profile management, certainly not like Facebook or MySpace. While you’ll still be somewhat limited on themes, you could take a look at having a Ning community. Ning is basically a large network of free communities. I paid for a few extra options, including the ability to use my own domain and to run ads. There are features for Ning including photo albums, profiles, videos and forums. You can turn features on or off, as well. It’s certainly going to offer you a lot more than just a simple blog would.
I don’t know what all is out there, but I would certainly want to point you in the direction of open-source options. This way, you have freedom to make any changes you feel you may need. If anyone in our community has better recommendations, I’m sure that they will write and let me know.
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