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How can newspapers get the most out of their Web site?

250px-top_of_rock_cropped.jpgFresh off of Nashville, members of The Temple News will be attending the College Media Advisers conference in New York City this weekend.

My adviser John DiCarlo and I have been asked to present on the topic of “getting the most out of your newspaper’s Web site” on Sunday at noon. This is admittedly a very broad topic, but I plan to bombard the attending advisers with practical, not abstract, advice. For example I’ll say “heres a tool to use for slideshows” before something like “embrace multimedia”.

Below is a list of things I have already come up with. I came up with these through my own brainstorming as well as rooting through or recalling blogs I’ve read.

I was wondering what would you add? Are there any resources you and your paper use that I didn’t mention?

  • Know ad rates for your competition, this includes blogs
  • Your site should enable your staff to easily post video, audio, soundslides, slideshows, pictures, and infographs
  • Utilize the Flickr slideshow tool (its free!)
  • Start a Facebook page
  • Make sure your article page is not a dead end (credit to Ryan for that one)
  • Offer an RSS feed for AT LEAST news and sports.
  • Use all of your properties to refer each other, i.e. blogs, newspaper, video, the web site etc…
  • Make sure your article page title is your headline (and other SEO advice…)
  • Publish web comments in the newspaper
  • Use the web to promote and make “evergreen” content such as dining guides
  • Make sure article pages have a print view
  • Take full advantage of tagging systems to lead readers between a columnist’s articles or a series you are running
  • Have an “online only” section so readers can see the content they missed
  • Have no registration, and have the barriers to comment and interact as low as possible (some may disagree, I know)
  • Set up a wiki to add to what my friend Christopher Wink would call “institutional memory”
  • Don’t forget that your paper’s Web site is still a Web site and should be crawlable by Google and Google News.
  • If you have beats, make them each a section of your site with tags
  • Make every byline link to all of the writer’s articles
  • Some pictures may be black and white in the paper, put the color version online

This list is evolving as fast as I can write in my notebook.

So what’s missing?

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