The Wake
The Wake is a student newspaper/magazine that’s published every fortnight at the University of Minnesota. Though it was founded in 2002, I’ve been reading it ever since I first got to the U in 2004. I always loved that it truly is an alternative voice for students at the University of Minnesota. There is very little advertising and all the writing, illustration, photography, design, and page layout is done by fellow U students. It’s truly something I’m proud to be a part of.
In December of 2007, The Wake approached me to redesign their web presence. This was no easy task, as there were some 1400 original articles in the deepest bowels of their original website. Not only were there 1400 stories, but their custom content management system used a set of proprietary tags instead of straight HTML for its text formatting. Not to mention that authors weren’t able to publish their own stories.
It was definitely time for an upgrade. To handle the content management side of things, I chose WordPress. Though originally written as an open source blogging application, WordPress is more than capable of providing the backend to an 80+ author and contributor website with more than 1400 articles in its back catalog.
WordPress is incredibly easy to hack to pieces, The Wake’s website being no exception to this process. It’s photo back-end is integrated with Flickr, as are its videos with YouTube. Comments and Stories are all available through RSS feed, and contextual ads allow The Wake’s website to actually generate some revenue. Who would have thought? Authors and contributors are able to create blogs on the fly.
One of the neatest feature that was included was the ability for editors to pick the cover (usually the cover from the printed edition) and create a color scheme from these color illustrations. This way, the content alone is the only distinction between the printed edition and the website.
In that vein, the CSS of The Wake was rapidly developed using the help of the beautiful (and relatively new) Blueprint CSS framework. I prefer to write my own CSS from scratch, but this site needed to be developed quickly, and allow for maximum flexibility and future-preparedness. The in-depth documentation will allow any future web administrator to change the entire look of the site in one go.
