Northern Student Site Report

Goals, Audience and Purpose Statement

Our goal is to create an online version of the Northern Student with a database of past and present stories. In the end (after the class is done) it would be uploaded onto the server and be updated weekly on Tuesday nights while the physical paper is being created. We wanted to put the Northern Student online so that there would be easier access and allow people that are not on-campus to access the paper.

Our audience will be fairly large and diverse. Our main readers would be college students. Other users would be parents and families of college students who want to find out what is happening weekly on the BSU campus and allow them to do such things as see how their child did in recent sporting events. We also believe that residents of Bemidji will frequently read the Northern Student; they would be interested to see what is happening on campus because college students can change the dynamic of the town. Members of the Northern Student would also use the site.

Our purpose statement is to create a Northern Student website to allow access to the Northern Student when a physical newspaper is not available. Our audience would use it to find out what is happening on weekly on the BSU campus. The site will allow users to access each of the categories (i.e. News, Entertainment, Arts, Variety, Op-Ed, Sports) of the newspaper and also allows them to submit story ideas, letters to the editor and advertising requests. Members of the Northern Student would use the site for research on past stories, as well as, it would create a reader/writer relationship that would be more interactive, i.e. they can comment on the individual articles and e-mail each journalist directly.

It would differentiate from other because it is directed to deliver primarily BSU news. Another difference is that mainstream new sources often update daily, where as the Northern Student would only update weekly. It would compare largely to mainstream sites, such as the Star Tribune or even the Bemidji Pioneer.

It would be structured like other mainstream news sites. It would allow the user a familiarity so that they could easily navigate around the Northern Student page. We will have the Northern Student logo on the top of the page that would be identical to the Northern Student logo on the physical newspaper. The navigation on the left side of the page will hold the categories (the same as that of the physical newspaper) as well links to advertising information, submissions and story ideas for future papers. The stories and photos would be located on the right side, the main part of the page.

Related or sibling sites: reviews

1) Park Rapids Enterprise. We found numerous things that we disliked about the page and that we would not draw in our own design. We did not like the ads location on the website; they were distracting and "busy." There were three navigation bars in three different locations. It created confusion and the page was unsymmetrical. We did like the navigation bar, which held the categories, on the top of the page, underneath the logo. We also liked the placement of photos of the text on the main page, although the stories and photos are not cited as to who they are created by.

2) LA Times. We thought that the LA Times was so full of information and links. The only was to navigate around the site easily is to click on the link to the site map. It would be hard to find exactly what the user wanted to see other than the information on the main homepage. There is a search bar on the top of the page to easily navigate around to certain pages. We liked this feature and would like to use one in our own site. They also had a link to the print version of the newspaper. We liked that and thought that we could put a link to the PDF files of the Northern Student.

3) SCSU University Chronicle. We liked this page a lot. The categories were easily located on a navigation bar on the left-hand side of the page. It was also a very "clean" page and easy to view. They also have a search bar, which we are interested in using on the Northern Student site. The photos are sized well, which we really liked, because many sites have photos so small that they are hard to view. Although, we found out that they "cheat" on their webpage and go through a publishing company called College Publisher Network. We thought that since it was a university that the students would learn how create and update their own website.

4) Minnesota Daily. We liked how the navigation bar is lined up on the left-hand side in sections that are understandable and useable.

Theme of our site

We are making the Northern Student site for reference, a reference to what is happening at BSU and the surrounding area. We would create the site using pages in a hierarchical design, starting with a homepage that links to all the other pages, so forth and so on. Our general content will be articles from the Northern Student, as well as, ad information, submission information, staff bios and general information about the Northern Student.

We want to have a page for each of the sections of the newspaper that would link to current stories in the weekly issues.

The staff bios would include a photo and a current profile of the individual.

Images or templates used which we did not create

We used quite a few images that we did not create. All of the pictures that go along with the stories are property of the Northern Student and were taken by the Northern Student staff.

We also used the BSU logo, but we made sure not to stretch or change its design, which is requested by Bemidji State University.

Problems Encountered

There were quite a few problems that we encountered while trying to create the Northern Student site.

One of the largest problems was getting the information that we needed. The stories were not always saved on the zip disks they way that they should have and in the middle of creating the website the News zip actually died, which meant that we had to recreate the whole News page on our website.

When we first started our page, we struggled with making the buttons the proper size, and keeping the page simple enough as to not distract from the content.

The photo zip did not contain the images that we needed for unknown reasons, so we still have to try and find those images in the Northern Student.

Getting the staff together for pictures was really hard. We finally had to create categories without pictures because we did not have time to chase everyone down. That’s a matter of planning ahead and allowing enough time for people to fit it into their schedule.

We had to incorporate the pictures into the lay-out a few different ways. At first, we just kind of copied and pasted them in. But later found that out it looks much better to bring the picture into the story, with the text wrapping around it.

The main issue we had to work though was making the content more appropriate for the web. It’s easy to just copy and paste the stories into the template, but the web allows for a lot more room to expand the reader’s knowledge base. That being said, we added related content and hyper links in the stories.

We had to ensure that each page was titled properly, so that search engines could find our site.

Member tasks to create site

Missie took the pictures and made them web-ready, made the templates, worked with the “got beef” logo and created the link banner in Photoshop.

Patty copy edited, worked with the Northern Student banner in Photoshop.

Kelli found related content, found the Bemidji logo and made it web ready She also copy edited with Patty.

Northern Student
1500 Birchmont Drive
Bemidji, MN 56601
218-755-2987
nstudent@bemidjistate.edu
Site Creators: Missie Tomte, Patty Olmschenk and Kelli Gugisberg