This post originally was posted on the News Evolved Blog. Check it out!

The story behind it

News Evolved is my first attempt at a WordPress theme. It stemmed from working for the Whitman Pioneer as Web Manager during the Spring of 2009. During this time I realized that there wasn’t really a theme for WordPress that incorporated a lot of the new thoughts concerning the online presence of newspapers.

So, I decided to set out to build one of my own. Inspired by the model created during the Revenue Two Point Zero conference in Washington D.C. I wanted to create a theme that took advantage of the new forms of media and technology that have become almost common place.

What are my goals?

While I’m not a journalist and have never worked as a writer for a paper I do have a passion as a consumer and designer of news.

I don’t know what the future of journalism will look like for reporters (there’s people far smarter than me who are working on ideas though) but I want to do all that I can to try and help news adapt to the web.

I wanted to create a theme that put the focus of a newspaper website back where it should have been all along: on the content.

The main layout for article pages

For too long newspapers have had sites that take the view of “how can we make money from this?” News Evolved aims to be different. While designing I was thinking how can I make news appear in a more enjoyable and consumable manner? How can it draw readers in and once they’re in, what’s the best method for advertising?

I think it’s about time that newspapers started thinking of how they create the best environment and experience for the readers instead of how they can make the most money of readers.

To this extent News Evolved is aligned to a clean (in my eyes at least) grid and the ads remain where they will be most relevant: alongside the actual content.

What are the features and where’s the download?

News Evolved features a lot already and will be added to and expanded in the coming months. It’s available to download for free and all I ask is that you keep the spirit that I created it in alive. It’s meant to be something that evolves and changes with a news organization. So, share what worked for you, what plugins you found to be useful, etc.

The homepage of News Evolved

Features:

• multiple category layouts to better reflect the content on each page
• clean grid layout and even more simple article pages to keep the focus on the content
• room for easy integration with Publish2, Twitter, Facebook Connect, Flickr, and more
• integration with the Featured Content Gallery plugin for easy slideshows on the homepage

The above features are just a small part of what I aim to include and accomplish with this theme. If you interested in seeing what will be coming in the following weeks and months head over to the development roadmap.

Thank you for your interest in News Evolved. I would love to hear what you think about it in the comments below and if you’re interested in getting involved on the development side of it get in touch.

In the coming days I will be posting more details about some of the features that I’ve worked into News Evolved and my rationale behind them so stay tuned.

Earlier this week I talked with Daniel Bachhuber of CoPress about forming a group this summer for the college news organizations that will be redesigning their online presences. Daniel wrote up a quick summary and posted the audio from the call over on the Inside CoPress blog.

Since talking with Daniel I’ve done some more thinking about this and come up with a rough outline of what I would like to see happen.

Weekly or bi-weekly conference sessions

These would be designed to be roundtable critiques of each school’s design. Depending on how often people are working on them, it is the summer after all, they could be every week or just once a month.

Ideally those involved would spend time before the call poking around through one another’s designs and drawing up a list of what’s working and what isn’t.

This would allow for the calls to stay a manageable length. Hopefully they would be able to remain under an hour (assuming about ten minutes for a handful of participants).

A couple staff members at the Whitman Pioneer attended the ACP Conference in San Diego this year where Bryan Murley hosted such a roundtable website critique and they said that it was one of the most helpful things for them in thinking of how others viewed our site.

I think that sometimes it becomes to easy to just assume that a design decision works because you’re familiar with it without finding out whether it works for people unfamiliar with your site. These virtual roundtables would be designed to combat that problem.

Collaborative design

There is no way that I can emphasize how important I think collaboration is in regard to web design: it’s why I will be releasing News Evolved early and before it’s complete. I think that the best way for college news organizations, many of which have small web departments, to advance their websites is to take advantage of the crowd. The more people involved means that more ideas will be thrown around and implemented.

Everybody’s got their strengths and their weaknesses and that’s something that’s particularly true of designing something as massive as a news organization’s website.

The ideal situation in my eyes would be one in which the weekly roundtables were not just discussions but were opportunities for everyone to get involved in different projects. There’s no reason why the college news community cannot come together and take advantage of everyone’s strengths to push their designs further.

Those are the two biggest aspects of what I would like to accomplish with this during the summer. What do you think? Know anyone that would be interested?

If you’ve visited the blog at any point today you’ve probably noticed that there’s yet another new look. Trust that it will all be apparent by Monday and that it’s all a part of some significant work that I’ve been doing lately. Stay tuned!