Newspaper site

Brilliant Andrew!

I’d love a tutorial on the details of how you did this.

Many Thanks,

Ross

Great site Andrew. I’d love a run through of how you did that. I’m at AHS myself but it’s Auchterarder High School in Scotland. This sort of project is exactly what I’ve been looking for. Our current site uses WordPress but I would use this as a separate project.

Overall, it looks great. Very nice, professional looking.

Constructive criticism:

1) The color (light blue) of the links in the Recent Headlines section (and other places) is too weak for the page which otherwise has a strong look and feel.

2) The page fails validation:
This page is not Valid XHTML 1.0 Strict!

3) IE7 is putting both x any y scrollbars on your <div class="half"> sections, which looks really bad. Firefox seems to scale the divs okay, however.

4) The page size is getting big at 410kb, though still within reason. You might consider doing some image processing to reduce the size of your JPEGs.

Again, the design is outstanding, but could use some attention to the above issues, IMHO.

Hey everyone, thanks for the great feedback.

Deko, excellent stuff. I’ll get on that stuff right away.

The problem of image size is kinda tough. For the class I created a standard of 500px width for all images, save for web > jpg, quality 60. The front page articles can’t use the default thumbnail size for WP. I’m still working on that though.

Mm, gotta get my hands on some IE7. Parallels isn’t working like it should…

Getting on those links and validation now.

Hey Andrew, if you were serious about a tutorial, please drop me a line here: lonestarpress(at)hotmail(dot)com
Thanks

Nice work on the site, much more professional than anything my school could put together. I really like the layout, and it seems to work easily that normal students can post what they wrote.
Just out of curiosity, your school has a journalism class of ~60, how big is your school? Ours’ is about 20, and we have 2000 total.

Hey, thanks everyone! Deko, I tied up some of the problems you mentioned. I’ve going to keep <input type="search"> so it looks nice in safari but won’t validate. I fixed some other errors though.

I was thinking about the tutorial. I could do a tutorial, I could sell a generic template based on it, or I could just release it. After the 40k downloads of Wordspew and Democracy, I’m a little worn out by the prospect of support. We’ll see.

Nate, we have two periods for the class. Not sure if it’s a full 60, maybe closer to 50. Our school is about 1200 students.

really cool!

Why destroy such a good layout/design with Google ads? Why does anyone putting up a website destroy it with Google ads? I don’t get it – I think this is one of the most inspiring “newspaper”-style sites I’ve seen for a while, yet the intrusive, pervasive, obnoxious element is still there – the “Google ad”. Are you really gonna make money out of Google, or is Google gonna make money out of you? I think you have a very good, clean “newspaper” design – it falls down because of the Google ad element – it’s so “cheesy” – and ultimatly, cheap. Otherwise, very cool – well done.

I disagree marko. Advertising has always been part of newspaper publishing and I think Andrew has really just tried to incorporate that “feel” into this one. Google ads is probably the most immediate way to achieve this but I suppose, later on, the school might perhaps consider offering advertising space to local businesses and community groups.

About the advertising – It’s something we’re still exploring. We haven’t made enough money to justify the “ugliness” added by Google ads. But that may change. We’re also exploring the idea of asking for direct donations (parents!) and local communities. We’ll see how that works out. One thing I wanted to avoid in the google ads was the integrated blending of ads. You know, when a google ad bar appears randomly in the middle of a post. I hate that.

Keep the feedback coming, this is excellent!

Wow. That’s…. wow. You need to do a detailed tutorial on your theme, maybe in a wiki somewhere? I dunno if the petaybes at codex would want that sort of thing, but boy is that something! It needs a home….

So okay, if you can’t find a home for it, let me know, and I’ll figure out how to give it one.

That’s literally the best school site I’ve ever seen. Many congratulations!

Hey, I could write articles on the website about how to make the website ??

Thanks for the kind words.

Yup, you could, and that would actually make sense! Good idea….

@jalenack – if you write those articles, post back here with links.

That’s a very nicely done site.