What you see below are my early (very, very early) outlines of a WordPress theme that I’m working on. After the Revenue Two Point Zero Conference posted the ideas that came out of that I’ve been tossing this idea around in my head for building a better news theme for WordPress sites.

The screenshots below (click for larger images) are just the really rough drafts that I sketched out in a couple minutes. If you’d like to see a more functioning demo then head over to my development page. This will also be kept up to date as I work on this.

First, some key points/goals with this design:

A much wider design than is traditional In order to take advantage of today’s wider displays the site is 1100 pixels wide. This may prove to be a bit too wide, but it will be at least 1050.

Remove ads from the homepage Keep them on article pages and limit it to one (extremely relevant) ad on that page.

Redesign category pages Category pages will be based off of the homepage and will work on the premise that if a reader wants an article from a long time ago they will search for it or browse the archives by month, etc. By not needing to allow for every article posted in that category to appear I’ll be able to make the category pages much more specific to their subject. Look for a scoreboard on the Sports page, a breaking news section on the News page, and much, much more.

Make it easy to incorporate videos, Twitter, etc. This has already been beaten to death elsewhere, but any news site that doesn’t think about incorporating these features is worthless in my eyes.

What I want to do with this is put some of what Rev2Oh thought about into practice. My initial design started with the homepage. For a while now I’ve been frustrated with newspaper homepages. Sure, they get a ton of information conveyed, but they do it in such an inefficient fashion. Because of the prominent placement for banner ads the content keeps getting pushed further down the page. My goal is to remove the ads and make the homepage something that people can look at quickly and then move on to actual articles (after all, that is what we want web users to do right?).

To this extent the homepage is designed to be a sort of digest. It’ll give a few key highlights of various sections, include some of the most photo-ready stories but ultimately its goal is to get readers to explore the site further.

The second thing that I thought of was article pages. Again, working off of the Rev2Oh model I wanted to incorporate one large ad that doesn’t distract but perhaps adds to the content. The analogy that Rev2Oh and others have used of designing a page like a magazine is a good one and it’s what I’m working with here.

Another feature for the articles is an “About the author box.” This will make it easy for readers to get a quick sense of the author. It’ll have a picture, short bio, and perhaps one more thing.

The article pages will also incorporate two narrow columns under the ad which will be able to display whatever someone wants them too. This will be a place for more features via plugins, etc.

There are definitely somethings that still haven’t been ironed out yet (a footer for one) and some things that will just be changed before the final version, but this is what I’m working with right now. Any thoughts, comments, etc. are more than welcome in the comments.

Update: I’ve got the prototype for article pages up now to. Check it out here.

Earlier today I posted on Twitter that I was “Wondering why more news orgs. don’t have a preview.example.com domain where they can experiment and gather feedback from users.” While I was largely thinking of professional news outlets like The New York Times or the Washington Post I think the same applies for college news.

I think that a question facing a lot of newspapers (college, corporate, and local) is how can we innovate without causing detrimental effects to our online presence? Redesigning homepages, advertising schemes, and premium content is certainly something that’s necessary but I think a lot of news organizations are worried that while they’re working out the details of innovating online they’ll scare away thousands of readers.

The solution to me seems to be creating a preview.example.com domain and to use this as a forum to experiment with new ideas as they arise. This site could operate off the same database as the standard site, thus pulling all new articles without having to upload them twice.

While what the New York Times is doing with its Article Skimmer is good it still misses some key points. A newspaper’s preview site should at the minimum:

Be well advertised from the standard homepage (I’m thinking something like “See what we’re working on” or “See where we’re going next” would work).

Provide a clear means of feedback (perhaps one of the Get Satisfaction “hovering bars” that some sites already use).

Provide an alternative to the entire site. Don’t just display the homepage differently, push yourself to create new ways of displaying articles, forums, category archives, etc. Create a consistent feel that is all new and don’t just send people back to the standard site when they want to actually read an article.

The conversations about how dead large (and small) newspapers are is starting to get old. Part of the problem with the traditional and current mode of news is that it’s too slow to react. Newspapers can talk all they want about how they will gain more revenue, but the reality is that they need to start implementing ideas and doing that quickly.

By creating preview sites news companies would be able to get a lot of ideas out in a short period of time. Also, if feedback were seamless and easy they would be able to quickly get a sense of what is working and what isn’t. I plan on doing this for the Whitman Pioneer this summer but I think it’s something that would get better with the size of a newspaper.

UC-Berkeley’s School of Journalism recently hosted a panel discussion about the San Francisco Chronicle and it’s future (or some might say, lack thereof). The always pertinent Dave Winer attended and shared his thoughts on his blog today. In a very interesting post he writes that:

I got the floor very briefly, at the end, after Scott Rosenberg tried to explain that journalism could happen without newspapers (he has posted his own account). I said the sources would take over the news. Not enough reporters covering the courtroom? The judge will report, as will the jurors, the attorneys, the plaintiff, the defendent. It will be messier, I would have said had I had the time to complete the thought, but more truth will come out.

I said that fifteen years ago I was unhappy with the way journalism was practiced in the tech industry, so I took matters into my own hands. And then dozens of people did, and then hundreds followed, and now we get much better information about tech. It will happen everywhere, in politics, education, the military, health, science, you name it. The sources will fill in where we used to need journalists.

This is one of the clearest and most believable descriptions of the future of news that I have read recently. Winer’s comparison to the tech industry is great. Fifteen years ago, who could have believed that sites like Engadget, TechCrunch, Macworld, and more would have the traffic that they now do? Some of these sites, specifically The Unofficial Apple Weblog, use content created by dozens of writers to synthesize into a comprehensive site for news of their particular topic.

Perhaps the traditional model of journalism will fall completely on its face in the coming months or years (my money’s on yes, it will). This should not be cause for alarm and despair though, it should be cause for innovation and progress. Be thankful that we’re put in a position where individuals can truly have a significant effect on the future of one of the more respected industries in the nation.