The little project of love that I’ve poured countless hours into has just sprouted it’s first pedal. After a couple of months of learning more CSS, WordPress, social media tools, SEO, among others, we launched UBC Insiders 3.0: the regraphicsing.
An explanation as to why we moved. While the UBC Blogs platform offered us a great home, we have ambitions, and there were a number of things which that platform limited us with.
On the new site, you’ll notice a handful of features.
* Business management: We’re trying to grow. In order to grow, we needed to take our business practices more seriously. Things like: monitoring site visits, site usage, feed subscriptions. Now we’re keeping detailed track of how Insiders is used and our reach. By integrating a new revenue stream (ads) into this, we hope to develop the capital to expand even further. This is also an experiment for me to learn little entrepreneurial tricks here and there.
* Asides: We found we were throwing out the vast majority of the stuff we found, because either it was too small, or not newsworthy enough for a full post. We’ve now captured this content into short, one paragraph posts, called “asides”.
* Graphics: Our recent survey indicated people didn’t like the site design. Yes, it is bland, and that was the original intention. As we try to expand our audience though, we needed more graphical control.
* Complete control: Now, since we own the server and domain name directly, we can do things like: properly implement our calendar feature, register @ubcinsiders.ca email addresses, upgrade our wordpress ourselves, and have autonomy from UBC’s servers (not that we suspected anything fishy–we had backups).
* I could learn WordPress better: I was looking for a Summer project. Learning WordPress better was on the backburner, and this was an obvious venture to tinker with.
I’m pretty proud of what I managed to get done here. While the front design of the site doesn’t look that different from the theme we used, the back end was gutted, and you’ll find a lot of attention to detail. It wasn’t easy balancing reader demands and writer demands with the vision I had in mind. I think this strikes that balance.
September 15, 2010 at 12:57 am
Use tags for titles. Re-organize to be the title of the post first followed by “| UBC Insiders”.
On the homepage, provide a better and more attractive tag for google. Ask yourself, what do I want people to search for, and find my website. Or just take some info from google analytics keywords and dump a good one in there to boost results for that term. I assume something like “UBC Insiders | UBC News & Information” would be a good one. I’m sure there are better ones.
Validate your XHTML with validator.w3.org . Close your frigging tag’s you hippies. & instead of &. Should reduce most of the errors.
CSS validation isn’t important. Don’t waste your time.
Make sure your site works in IE 6/7/8, since most of your readers will be using those browsers (and you probably don’t).
Remove HTML comments from output by wrapping them in PHP comments instead. <?php /* */ ?>
Change “post_cat” from h2 to something lower like h3 or if you don’t think it’s important. I’d go with .
You can choose your own non-google fonts with this little gem. Google fonts are for socialists.
http://www.fontsquirrel.com/fontface/generator