editors issues

As I'm acting as editor for our online magazine fucazine i am finding it difficult to criticise other peoples work. as they are my peers and friends constructively criticising pieces and even ideas is a constant battle. i am trying to be as honest as possible but also having to be careful about how i write the criticism as most of this is done by email and can be taken the wrong way.

trying to balance the write amount of negative with positive. as i want to keep my team motivated. especially as i am now asking for 2 pieces of written work a week and have set a strict deadline for Tuesday 5pm. as Emily is doing most of the technical design work i have limited her writing to one article a week. until the design is finished.

we are hoping to go live by next week and fingers crossed we will. I have also noticed the importance of communication. i can no longer just put my work off as i have to be on top as people are looking to me for advice on their pieces. this is quite a lot to take on and i didn't realise there would be so much organisational skill involved but i am enjoying the responsibility and skill involved in running a team. we are organised and ideas are flowing and people have kept to their deadline so far.

everyone knows what their doing and i am making myself readily available for my team whenever they need advice or criticism. so fingers crossed I'll keep it up!

design wise we have decided through talk with Steve that wordpress might be the way to go. frustrating because we don't get the design aspects we could with dreamweaver but it will be more consistent and easily updated using wordpress as it acts as a cms itself. need to discuss all the options and check how well wordpress is going to work with our interactive aspects, like if people are able to upload their own photo's if not can we link out etc.

all going to plan

OK so this far in and we have given our website a home page and designed some templates for the features. we've decided the look and feel of the website and justified everything a million times over. With me being editor we have set up fucazine@live.co.uk where we all communicate and send our written pieces in to. we've also looked into forums and galleries and in today's lesson we discussed using polls and not having drop down boxes on the menu bar as it can clutter things up.

I am also in the process of working out a proper production schedule and through the email account the other group members are able to pitch me ideas which i am able to constructively criticise and give feedback. we have also suggested that everyone must now be writing 2 pieces a week the deadline for this being 5pm on a Monday. this will give us enough content to launch in the next week or so.

who's doing what on the web?

Last lesson we looked at web analytics, we looked at how using programs or google's own program you can see who's using your website, how they got there how long they spend on each page and how users navigate through your website. Unlike magazines you can see pretty much see every detail about how someone uses a website. This is ideally great for advertisers as they can see how well their advertisements do. It also shows how so many advertisers are choosing to advertise on the web over print today and it seems likely that this trend will continue. Not only are they able to see how well their advertisements are working, how long people are looking at a page for example and where they a clicking on to after but it also means that instead of spending huge amount paying to advertise in newspapers or magazines online advertising seems relatively cheap in comparison. although as it becomes more popular, prices will rise.

If for example you have a magazine in print and also online like most magazines have today, the use of web analytic technology means you can see what a user wants to read, most popular hits for example and how many people and from what region of the country or even what county they are from, as this technology reads where the ip address is coming from. In realistic terms it means you will have a better knowledge of your audience and you have evidence of what is working well and what isn't. You can also see whether people are coming direct to the site using the url or whether they are using search engines. This means if people are coming through search engines it may be important to make sure your website is high up on the google result. Optimising your google search result can be done by using google keyword tool. Using phrases and words you think people might be looking at it gives you other words to use that are most common among users giving you a better chance of moving up the google results list. Repetition of these keywords will be needed which is a huge difference from writing for any other medium. It seems quite difficult to repeat yourself a lot but without making the writing sound patronising. once we get our site live i think it would be good to keep checking the google analytics of the site so we can see how its being used and take advantage of it. If people are taking certain paths through the website or one topic is more popular than another it will help when adding new pieces to the site. Possibly adding different buttons on the home page to get attention and take the users another way.