Newspaper site, and WP as CMS

  • With my heart pounding, I just successfully upgraded my news site to WP 2.9. All went well except for one plugin no longer working: custom post templates. I will have to come up with a work-around until/unless the plugin developer comes through with a fix.

    Larchmont Gazette is a community news site. We started on WP 2.7.1 back in April, 2009, moving from a totally HTML Dreamweaver process to the WordPress environment. All of our old content, dating back to 2002, is still in HTML form, and we just link back to it.

    I use 26 plugins and countless widgets to achieve what you see on the front page. We need to show very different sidebar content depending on where you are in the site, so that’s where the widgets and plugins come in handy. The theme, Atahualpa 3.4.4, is amazingly customizable and lets me put extra widget areas almost anywhere.

    Content is king, so we deliberately keep the pretty graphics to a minimum. I’d like to add a nicer logo graphic eventually.

    We recently moved from prohosting.com to hostgator.com, and our speed improved dramatically.

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  • Looking good. It’s OK to be minimalist in pictures. Functionality and content is more important. The featured section on the mainpage is also nice with some images. Good job!

    Hi, well done very informative site as you would expect, I could not agree with you more with “content is king”.

    You say about keeping the graphics to minimum, the thing i noticed was your sites name/logo on the header doesn’t jump out at me,

    maybe do something to enhance this, also have some sort of catchy slogan to grab visitors attention to make them stay and read your content.

    Other than that you have done a great job,well done.

    [signature moderated Please read the Forum Rules]

    Nice blog, surely content is king and you got loads of content. Love the layout too, simple and clean. Though, for a news blog i prefer a breaking news thing at the very top, something like a headline or featured news ??

    site loading is great, hostgator is really good,

    Thread Starter paulaeisenberg

    (@paulaeisenberg)

    Thank you, everybody, for the great feedback.

    Directorysieve, I guess we should be glad we don’t have a lot of breaking news to feature, since that kind of news is usually bad! We do use a marquee effect when we need to get the reader’s attention, like for school closing due to snow, election results, etc.

    I like the layout of the homepage and the idea of using WordPress as a newspaper type of website.

    You should take a look at something like OIO publisher to further automate advertising.

    I would put a Register link next to your login- link at the bottom of the page.

    If its possible, you might want to remove the changind(fade effect) advertisement at the top. Its a distraction for the visitor. Please reconsider the same as its very annoying for a first time visitor.

    After some pages, one gets used to it but then that’s what I feel.

    When content is king, you have a fat and overloaded king there. You should definitely have less infos on the front page. Have a thin, good looking queen to present the king less fat.

Viewing 8 replies - 1 through 8 (of 8 total)
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