w00t, w00t: Visuals editor Will Wooten starts redesign blog

Let the Web design blogging begin!

Will Wooten, visuals editor at The Miami Hurricane, has started a blog about online journalism, specifically the redesign of The Hurricane’s Web site.

Will is overseeing the aesthetic side of the project and will be posting updates and information about the redesign process. The blog will also act as a means for gathering feedback and discussing the new site.

And what is the name of this forum?

Will’s Blog.”

Why such a simple name?

“The reason is, it is what it is. I don’t want anything creative.”

What about the design and color scheme?

“The serious bloggers are going to be using a reader anyway.”

Unrelated, my favorite quote from Will came as he was updating his resume last semester. As he was finishing, he realized something:

“I forget to put that I was Time Magazine’s person of the year in 2006 on my resume.”

Converting to Drupalism

Drupal is looking more and more attractive as a replacement content management system for The Miami Hurricane‘s Web site. Our webmaster, Brian Schlansky, recently downloaded it and set it up on a virtual server on his laptop.

Here are some Drupal-related links:

College newspapers with Druapal (Media sites using Drupal):

I’m going discuss Drupal’s settings and modules in greater depth with Brian and post my thoughts. Stay tuned.

Background: Drupal is a free, open-source CMS and used by other newspaper for their site management, so it definitely seems like a viable option. We currently use College Publisher, which doesn’t give us the freedom we would like and has been very frustrating recently.

Other CMS options I looked at:

Weigh in: What CMS does your newspaper site use? Why is it good or bad?

Poynter site redesign process: A good model

I really like how Poynter is approaching their site redesign, it provides a good model for how TheMiamiHurricane.com, and others, should go about it.

Here’s a video from Poynter’s YouTube channel:

For more information about their redesign, check out the Poynter Online – Poynterevolution page.

School of Comm dean finalist for Syrcause spot

Here’s a breaking news story I reported Tuesday night, thanks to an item from Romanesko:

Communication dean finalist for spot at Syracuse University (The Miami Hurricane)

This was the first local reporting of the story, which broke in Syracuse. It has more background and the first public comment from Grogg.