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.