Newsletter No. 7: More on interactivity
Last time, I brought up the idea of making your site a place for locals to meet and interact — with you as well as with one another — to increase the value of visiting your site.
Instead of making your site a re-hash of the print edition, turn it into a valued destination or portal, a place where people can get your news, but also a place where they can create interest groups locally, chat and comment on the happenings around town and so on.
Let’s face it: people just don’t get together face to face as much as they used to, but they can “meet” online asynchronously. Many are doing it already at other sites, so why not set up your site for community journalists, bloggers and special-interest groups?
Once you set it up, there is little you have to do beyond moderating to watch out for flame wars and keep track of your Google Analytics numbers as they take off. More visitors means more eyeballs to sell to advertisers, especially ones who want to reach those narrow demographic special-interest groups, like the young mothers. Wouldn’t that be a fairly easy sell?
Here are some free software sites that will make your site more interactice with little fuss.
www.simplemachines.org — a free forum software. I use it at News Design School.
www.elgg.org — a fairly new free social networking software. Looks good to me so far.
www.wordpress.org — the classic free blogging software you can customize in many ways.
www.joomla.org — a nifty free dynamic web site creation software package that has thousands of free templates. Will create sites that are much easier to work with than your static HTML pages, once set up. Setup is tough, but running it afterward is easy. You can find people online who will host and set up your site for you (e.g., www.siteground.com).
The best free software of all is found at www.crossloop.com. This new site has software that allows someone else to either view your computer screen from afar (only if you allow it, of course), and even control your computer to, for instance, fix a problem. Or show you how to do something. Or critique an important layout. I see many uses for it, both through News Design School and through the use of Crossloop’s available technical support consultants.
Remember the main message: the key is to make your site the go-to place in your community, not just a re-hash of your print edition. Don’t think of your web site as simply a digitized newspaper, think of it as a hub of all the news and entertainment your readers could possibly be interested in and a place to meet-and-greet online.
Bob Bohle
bob@newsdesignschool.com
Home page: http://newsdesignschool.com
Don’t forget to check out our online newspaper design tutorials!