DESIGN

While design wasn't originally my forte, that never prevented me from diving right in and trying. Although the transition away from print magazines to website meant no more spreads designs. On the contrary, it required more focus on the design of the website and digital stories.

When I became Editor-in-Chief at the start of the 2022-23 school year, I decided to work with SNO's site overhaul process. They turned the newly designed website back over to us, and we did not like it. I decided to take matters into my own hands.

Using the widget design panel in SNO, I moved parts around and got into the nitty-gritty. I fixed columns, buttons and lines to ensure they were aligned and properly spaced, working in unity. Why was the Trending Stories widget at the bottom? I made it be the very first thing you see. Why were the colors different shades? I spent hours matching the blacks, greys, whites and yellows to keep the same shades throughout.

We rebuilt the website back up. 

We switched our logo from a calm, lowercase font with purple and blue to a bright and bold uppercase font. Not only did my new designs incorporate our school's colors, but also, the intense contrast did so in an attention-grabbing way. It screams "HEY! Notice me," grabbing readers' attention. We followed these updates throughout the website and social media, changing profile pictures to the new logo and adding the black and yellow colors throughout the website.

I continued the bold and dark theme throughout the website. As seen below, the sections of the homepage of the website now have black bars to emphasize the category names and help add emphasis to make the featured images pop.

Speaking of the sections for the different categories, I kept the homepage clean and organized by creating a rule that each story could only be in the main categories displayed on the homepage. This prevented content from seeming overly repetitive and gave viewers more to see, also reducing the bounce rate by easily offering more reads just a click away.

I also created new categories only present under drop-down menus available in the menu bar to help readers find the specific content they desired. For example, no matter if a video is a Feature, News, Opinion or other, it'll always be in the "Podcasts & Videos" category too. Another example of this is in the Opinion section: after a judge complained about our lack of columns, I created a column-specific category included in the Opinion section so that readers have the option to view all opinion pieces or just opinion content in the form of columns. 

For the first time ever, I started the Scores & Schedules page, adding sporting teams' season schedules and game updates. After adding it under the Sports tab, I also added it to the homepage to make it easier to find. The Recent Results are also synced to the ticker I created that runs along the top of the website to provide viewers with sports scores in a quick hit.

Along the lines of making content easier to find, I also created a Media tab to organize different types of media. Now, there's a drop-down menu with sections for Podcasts & Videos so that viewers can find what they're looking for and see the different types of content we produce. Using a WordPress add-on, I even created a Photos page, designed to showcase all the different photos from across the site in one place.

When designing story pages, I implemented a new rule that every piece would be required to have at least one graphic or photograph. This helped incorporate more media onto our website and also pushed students and editors alike to strengthen their photography and graphic design skills.

Above is an example of the required graphic per story rule in action. I helped the staffer by designing the graphic myself.