After a few fruitful months as the little brother of The Linc newspaper, The Linc Online’s previous version brought over 3000 monthly visits to the site and proved to be success amongst the media outlets at the University of Lincoln. But as times change, I thought it was time for a major redesign. The Linc Online went out of the grid this time, bending the rules of usual online newspaper publishing. And still, why would we change something that proved to work just fine?
The answer is quite obvious. We are students, we have the chance to experiment and try out new things. So I will take this occasion to explain some of the decisions I took during the redesign.
The three column design allowed us to put in front of the reader more content and side messages, but at the same time was obstructing the core element: the articles themselves. The side columns were too wide and were restricting the way the articles and their images were displayed. Plus, the white and blue color scheme got a bit tiring for the eye after a while.
We sticked to our Wordpress engine but decided to use a theme called Massive Press, by Jason Shuller, a very talented young designer (more of his work, including premium themes, can be found at www.wp-elements.com). I adapted a few elements of the site to suit our needs and backlogged some newer articles.
The most important additions the new site brings are the featured articles carousel, that displays 5 highlighted articles selected by us, and the two column layout, that emphases the articles on the site, while allowing us to display additional content on the right, like recent articles, advertising blocks and recent comments.
From now, The Linc Online can be read from mobile devices, with the help of a special theme, making the website load faster on any internet enabled phone. And of course, there are the usual RSS feeds for aggregating the site’s content in newsreaders of your choice. Along with the new content, you can find the team’s personal blogs listed next to their name in ‘The Team’ section of the site.
As usual, we are open to any suggestions and feedback, so I’m looking forward to hearing from you, either via email or leaving a comment.
on Jun 1st, 2008 at 4:17 pm
Loving the new look Dan. Can’t wait to see issue 11! Best of luck with everything!