Blueprint for a new media web site
This is kind of unrelated to what he has been talking about lately, but I wanted to grab it and share. Ryan Sholin has a good blueprint put together for media web sites that we all can follow very easily, and more importantly, he’s dead on.
Here’s the list of five things. Let me know what you think.
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Abandon (your current CMS) and rebuild the site in Drupal with proper commenting, registration, user profiles, blogs for all users.
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Take blog posts and podcasts out of the little ghetto-ized boxes on the homepage and feature them as you would feature any other piece of content.
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Make your multimedia players as big and bold and featured as the Las Vegas Sun. The work your staff is doing demands and deserves it.
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Recruit local bloggers from neighborhoods around San Jose to lead local social networks – if you built the site with Drupal, this wouldn’t be complicated. They can moderate, manage, and cheerlead as necessary. Give the readers/users a sense of ownership of their neighborhood coverage.
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Don’t feature national/world news on the homepage unless it happens in San Jose, with few exceptions.
Amen, sir, especially the Drupal comments. I got religion that CMS doesn’t have to be a mess.