Posted by espenmoe on September 4, 2008 at 7:49pm
In a few weeks we are going to re-launch our newspaper, and the new site is based on Drupal5. We are still running the install on one of our desktop machines running Ubuntu, so the performance is not close to what we except from the final product.
It would be great if some of you could take a look at the site, and tell me your first impression.
The articles are not written in Drupal, but in an editorial system delivered by Atex. All stories are written in MS Word, and automatically exported to xml-files. These files are then injected into Drupal as nodes. At present day xml-export is up and running, and all stories published on our current site are available on the new Drupal-site.
Please take a look at http://beta.journalisten.no/.
Comments
Like it
My first impression is the clean presence, the lead art. I also notice the ads, but It does not interfere with my interpretation of the page hierarchy. And then, admittedly not understanding the words*, I scroll down and am a little bored by those two stories (maybe it's the awkward white space?), but the second large art revives my interest.
I all but ignored the second column of stories (maybe some art would help draw the eye?).
All-in-all I really like the clean structure, and can only speculate that you're putting it to good use to organize the importance and category of story. But, again, since I can't read it I'm a bit limited in being able to understand the grouping.
The rather awkward white space in the lower 2/3rds of the page bored me a bit, but I did, however, notice the heads more, which can be a real plus when dealing with compelling content.
Mixed all together, my impression is a good one.
Assume you've see the work by Information Architects?
This is our site, which should give you an idea of where my tastes lie -- it's a perpetual work in progress.
*Side rant: Always bugs the hell out of me at SND competitions when pages are judged by those not being able to read the words. If you can't read it how can you tell if the presentation is effective and accurate??
Nice and clean
God morgon!
First of all - congratulations to a nice new site!
My spontaneous comments:
* The site has a very clean look, which I guess was the intention when designing the theme. I like it.
* The first page is very long. I think this is common practice among news sites (though at least I don't scroll more than one screen or two), but I don't think the tag cloud at the bottom will get much attention. It may get more attention from search engines than from people, which is a reason to keep it, but I would consider shortening the start page a bit.
* After some scrolling the main content area and the (left) side column merges visually, especially if you use AdBlock. I'd like to have them more separate. My first idea for this is shading the background of the side column, and my second was changing the fonts in the column block. I don't know if any of the ideas are good...
* I like the right side column.
* I also like article pages. They are easy to read, I like the way you put "les mer om" links in the main text area, and the tag cloud at the end makes much more sense than on the front page.
* It seems you are creating URL aliases, I notice that you don't use the story titles or dates. Is there a particular reason for? (From search engine perspectives I think dates and titles are recommended.)
* When looking at the source code it seems your right side column (tertiary column) is rendered before the main content. This seems weird and will probably lessen your impact at search engines. Is there any particular reason?
* Nice functions for newsletters, nice mix in the left side column, RSS is great (both your own and the national/international imports).
* The login box is a bit strange - is this only used during production stage? I can't find any reason to create an account on the site, and if you want people to login you probably shouldn't put the login box at the bottom. If the login is used by admins only, going directly to /user makes more sense. You could of course also add a small "staff login" link at the bottom of the column, if you're afraid some people will forget the /user path.
In all, congratulations. Let us know when the official site launches, all right?
Will there be a writeup of what's happening behind the scenes? (The Word to Drupal export sounds interesting.)
Lycka till!
//Johan Falk, Sweden
Similar thoughts with Johan
Hi,
First of all - a really nice site. The pages look fresh and peaceful and ads are nicely in balance. Some points:
- Nice job on the taxonomy term pages!
- Please do use pathauto to include (for example) nid and title in the path (really cool thing for SEO with next-to-zero work)
BR,
Joonas / uusisuomi.fi (also relaunching our theme this autumn)
URL from old CMS
Tjenare!
Thanks for nice review.
Login box is gone ;-)
The main reasons our articles are aliased with "http://beta.journalisten.no/story/#####
is that we actually are able to preserve the current url they have in our old CMS. In other words: no links are going to corrupt when we change to Drupal.
After the change all new content will have search engine-friendly urls.
I promise you a writeup a short time after release, and that is going to happen in a couple of weeks.
Espen Moe
beta.journalisten.no
Some questions
What about ad inventory? I'm not sure I'm seeing any ads at all. (Don't read Norwegian.) The standard ad inventory that seems to be evolving on US sites is like so:
728x90 top banner
330px right column with 160x600 OR 300x250 OR 300x600
300x250 "in-story" ad on story pages
720x90 bottom banner
We're using these in our wireframes, and hope to evolve a standard baseline template that we can release.
What about SEO? We have pathauto placing taxonomy terms into paths, plus dates, plus headlines with underscores, all on the advice of our SEO experts. We're trying to tune both for Google and Google News. Results look like this:
http://example.com/georgia/2008-09-04/coastal_area_will_be_spared_of_hea...
re: Google News
I believe you have to have a random number in the URL somewhere for Google News. Might check into it.
-kpaul
Yes, 4 digits.
You need 4-digit number in the url to be listed by google news (in most cases), and the number can't resemble a year.
We used Pathauto and just specify the node number -- it meets google's needs and is an easy way for us to see what node might need attention.
Ad-format
Hi!
Our main kind of ads are people trying to hire new staff-members in norwegian newspapers, radios, tv-stations etc. Those are the four boxes at the far right.
Our primary format for web-banners are 468x60 banner-ads (named "thinbanner" i Norway).
SEO will be done with all new content published after we switch to Drupal.
Espen
beautiful site
looks nice, espenmoe.
Would you be willing to expand on how you solved getting data into or out of Drupal with Atex?
Problems you came across, modules used, or custom modules that you've had to develop.
I've read Mr. Yelvington's blog, which goes into it a bit. (although I'm not familiar with DTI.) Having never built a drupal site that needed to work with a real publishing system, I was hoping on some advice on how to approach this.
Thanks in advance, and again great site. (it seems like Drupal may be catching on for news sites in Europe and Scandinavia.)