Monday 24 September 2012

Winol website changes etc.

After some discussion today with Chris and other members of the news/production team, it has been decided that we will be making some pretty major changes to the web side of Winol this year.

Firstly, I'm sure most of you will be very happy to hear that we are moving from Joomla to WordPress, and we will still be able to keep the winol.co.uk domain name. We're hoping that this will be easier to maintain and keep constantly up to date, like any news website should be. We are effectively starting fresh.

Winol will no longer be broadcast 'live at 5'. We often struggled to keep this deadline last year, and we can't ever afford to send the bulletin out late. From now on our viewers will be getting their 'news fix at 6' (until we can think of something a bit less awful.)

Social media will be a big part of Winol this year. Thankfully we have a role assigned to keeping on top of our social media and promotion, this is Hannah's job and she will be primarily in charge of the Winol Twitter and creating a Winol Facebook page. We will be trying to make sure that the Twitter ticker is always working and looking good.

Our main inspiration for the website will be the Daily Mail's 'Femail' section. Largely due to the big lead feature, surrounded by smaller features (which for us will be a mixture of features and news stories.) We will be able to make our page look busier than it does now, because we will have more news stories thanks to a bigger news team. Sport will have it's own dedicated homepage, probably with a similar look to the main site.

We discussed a 3 o' clock deadline for all written stories, I think this is realistic in 90% of situations, as most VT's will have been submitted much earlier in the day, then written stories can be online long before the bulletin. Written stories will, as always, need a still image with them.

Finally (I think), we will be trying to introduce HTML5 rather than flash, apparently this is generally better and more modern but not something that I am particularly confident with yet, so may be something that Jason will be primarily taking care of for the time being.

Let me know what you all think, give me more suggestions and tell me any problems that we haven't thought of.

THANKS!