I wrote recently about the last two articles that would go up on The Linc’s website in 2009. In it, I included some statistics: since September 14th there were 225 articles posted, of which 95 were news.
The sheer number absolutely amazes me. But I am greatly saddened when I take a look at the online presence of our closest competitor, Bullet Magazine. Whereas the amount of stories we posted averages out at nearly two and a half every single day between 14/9/09 and 20/12/09, there are just 29 articles on Bullet’s website — averaging out at one every three and a half days.
This is absolutely baffling, as Bullet has had three printed issues this semester. I can’t tell you how many articles they published in total as all the copies are back in Lincoln, and they’re not available online at all, despite their Facebook page promising that “Bullet Magazine is also available as a downloadable PDF at www.bulletonline.org.” (Note: This was removed while I was writing this article. There were significant changes to their Facebook page today.)
In this article I will examine Bullet’s current situation online, look at the technical issues that prevent them from having a good, easily accessible, and easily updatable website, and suggest changes that they can make in order to improve things.
I am not doing this to brag, to glibly point out flaws, or spitefully criticise them. If this was the case, I wouldn’t offer suggestions for changes. On the contrary, my motive is to help them build a better online presence, as it is utterly essential for both those writing the articles, and those reading them. Putting copy online allows for a more-or-less permanent archive, that is accessible by anyone, anywhere in the world, and all you need is an internet connection.
It allows writers to easily share material with friends, family, or potential employers, and the material will be accessible long after they’ve graduated.
Readers can similarly share material very easily with people who can’t get their hands on a physical copy, or access it themselves if they don’t have one. The persistent nature of online content allows for them to read older articles, long after the issue has disappeared from the stands.
There are no downsides. With the right setup, putting things on a website is incredibly quick and easy. There is no excuse not to do it.
Now
The current website is an absolute mess, for several different reasons. They range from the hilarious to the tedious. I’m going to start with the structural factors — how the site’s built, how it runs — and then discuss the content (how it’s displayed, how often it’s been updated, and not judgements on quality).
Use of Blogger for article hosting
Bullet’s website uses Blogger to host all of its articles. But rather than it being a straightforward Blogger site, each section runs from a separate blog. These use an essentially blank theme, and are framed on the site. To see this for yourself, pick any article, right-click on the date, and open the link in a new tab.
The image on the left shows what the front page draws its content from — it just frames a Blogger blog. This is done for every section on the site. Here’s a list of all of the blogs used:
By far, this is the stupidest setup I’ve ever seen. I can’t even begin to imagine what made anyone think this was a good idea. The only thing that it achieves is being able to separate out the categories, and have customised surrounds for them on the Bullet site.
It’s ugly, inefficient, and requires the maintenance of seven different content catalogues. Because of the complete separation between them it means that you can’t easily access all of the content — they are walled off into their own sections.
On Facebook, one member of the staff has said “the website is causing some issues at the moment due to its set up [sic]”. It’s painfully obvious why. Blogger does not work well as a CMS. It’s quite good for simple, journal-style blogs. (As in, actual blogs.)
Its options are limited if you want or need to handle a lot of diverse content, and display that content in different ways. What Bullet have done is attempt to wring a CMS out of Blogger by stapling together several blogs. But that doesn’t overcome any of the limitations, and just adds to the complexity and awkwardness of the system.
Unless you want to just show a long list of posts, displayed in their entirety, don’t use Blogger.
Page design
Because the actual content is framed and separate from the rest of the site, development of the surrounding area is also separate. And clearly there hasn’t been a lot done. Each page features a sidebar to the left of the content frame. Most of them are empty. Only the features and fashion sections have anything written in the side. The rest are just long strips of grey — that two sections have something in the sidebar shows that the rest is down to laziness.
And talking of length, the issue with pages being unnecessarily long is still there. Each page except for the news section have a roughly-800 pixel tall empty space. (News has a smaller gap, but there is still one there.) I can’t for the life of my figure out why. For most computers, this is at least a screen-full of empty space.
This is even true for pages that have a relatively large amount of content, such as the features page.
Content
As mentioned, there is very little content on the whole site. The “Photoblog”, “Magazine”, and “Info” pages are completely blank, and there are just 29 articles spread across the other sections. It does not take a lot of effort to put content on the internet. This smacks of laziness. They have access to all of the copy they published in the three printed issues, so why not put that online?
The features section is the one updated most recently, on December 3rd, whilst the music section hasn’t been updated since September 17th.
There is no excuse for this.
Perhaps it’s just as well that there isn’t a lot of content on Bullet’s website, as there would be no useable archive system to back it up. The only section with a visible archive is fashion, which has the standard Blogger archive widget tacked to the top. Because of the use of seven different blogs, it would only be possible to show a per-section archive, rather than one that covers everything on the site.
Standards
Yet another thing that differs across the site are the rules for content. There don’t seem to be any. To ensure consistency a website should have rules on things such as headline length, picture sizes, etc.
This is something Bullet clearly have not thought about, which allows atrocities such as this four-deck headline to be committed. The 14-word headline occupies the same amount of space as the 122-word story underneath it.
There are also no standards for picture usage or sizes. Some articles have them, some don’t, and all images are of different sizes.
Nor has any thought been put into how to use the front page. Currently there are two items on the front page: a link to an interview with Mary Stuart, and the editor’s letter from the September 2009 issue. Also, because of the framing system, if you click on the link to the interview with Mary Stuart it opens in the front page frame (rather than taking you to the features section) and the content has its own scrollbar.
Summary
Bullet Magazine’s current website is just awful beyond belief. It’s crap.
There’s little content. What stories it does have are managed used a fragmented, fundamentally incapable system, which has been combined with static HTML to form a monster of a site.
It is set up in a way that is needlessly complicated, and cannot be changed in order to produce a good product.
Prescription
Bin it.
Bin it off.
Bin it off right now.
Next
You have to start again. But this time take a different path.
Use WordPress
There should be no argument over this. There are many crap sites that can be improved by simply switching to WordPress, and Bullet’s is one of them.
WordPress is a much more flexible and powerful CMS, but this power is not overwhelming. Instead it makes many things much easier to do, with far better results. It would give you the unity between design and content that is desperately needed, as it provides a “complete” system.
You manage your design and your content with basically the same interface, and the two are both separate and connected. Any changes you make to the design won’t affect the integrity of your content (though it will display differently) and at the same time you make design choices to better display your content. Right now the framing system completely separates the two. This is not necessary, and is in fact harmful.
I’ve come to believe that the custom HTML & framing solution was so that different sections could have their own styling (different colour bars at the top) and comments in the sidebar. It was a pretty bad solution, but it sort of worked. In WordPress there is a way of having custom archive pages that will let you do this. I haven’t tried it myself, but there are resources to help. (Here’s the WordPress codex page about archives.)
Switching to WordPress will fix most of the technical problems and strangeness that results from the current setup.
Content
But technical issues aren’t the only problem right now. Yes, they hurt everything on the site, but you could still publish articles.
This wasn’t happening. I’d love to hear excuses for this, because they’d all be bullshit. There is no reason why all of the articles published in the three printed issues this semester are not on the website, apart from laziness on the part of the people responsible.
The “Online Editor” position has just disappeared from Bullet’s Facebook page. It’s unclear what exactly this role entailed, but if Paul Moffat had sole responsibility for uploading content then that was a very stupid decision. At the very least, each section editor should have a WordPress login and be responsible for posting their section’s articles.
And everything written in every section should be put online. It’s easy. There is no excuse for not doing so.
What is uploaded should adhere to guidelines that are clearly laid out. These should be written with regards to the specific theme being used, so that it’s clear what size pictures are needed, how many characters result in clean headlines and excerpts, etc. Write them down, email them out, and get everyone who’s uploading content to stick to those guides. This will result in a standardised and consistent look.
Case in point
To show just how easy it is to do, I did it: Bullet Magazine on WordPress.
Go have a look, poke around, and then come back.
The whole thing took me an hour to set up last night, and about half of that time was uploading the content (all of which is my own, so there are no possible copyright issues).
It was free, and required no technical knowledge (the WordPress implementation that should be used will require some technical knowledge, but it can be picked up extremely quickly).
It is a better website in every single way than Bullet’s current one. And it took me an hour.
Here’s a round up of all the points that need to be made about this example:
- It’s on WordPress.com, so you don’t have full control over the HTML or CSS, amongst other things. Bullet should host their own WordPress.org blog.
- Certain things aren’t implemented, such as customised category pages. See here for information.
- The theme used is the only magazine-style one available for WordPress.com users. The self-hosted version should be used, and there are plenty of suitable themes available.
- I suspect they’ll want to keep a similar arrangement to what they have now, where the front page is separate from the other sections. This can be achieved, but requires a little bit of work. See here and here.
Concluding note
As I have shown, it would be very easy to replace Bullet’s current, awful website with a WordPress-powered one that would be far superior in every aspect.
It would take next to no time, and would probably cost nothing (as they have web hosting and a domain name already).
All that is required is the will to do it.
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