Web
As the Director of an online publication, understanding Web development and troubleshooting issues are very important to keep our site running smoothly. For the past two years, I've started the school year by redesigning the website with the Creative Design Manager. Last year and this year, we have reformatted the blog layout at the bottom of the site with custom HTML code to look like this:
Web
As the Director of an online publication, understanding Web development and troubleshooting issues are very important to keep our site running smoothly. For the past two years, I've started the school year by redesigning the website with the Creative Design Manager. Last year and this year, we have reformatted the blog layout at the bottom of the site with custom HTML code to look like this:
Bloggers on staff regularly email me with their newest stories so I can tease them on the bottom of our site by writing new HTML code with the new link to their post. From reformatting the site, I started learning more code which eventually inspired me to take a computer science course this year.
In addition to reformatting the blogs, I helped redesign our site's colors, fonts, and home page photo carousel. This year we took away our normal blue colors on our site and replaced them with a grayscale theme so the photos would pop, something that many professional journalism sites do.
Since RubicOnline functions with SNO WordPress, anyone who works on staff is able to look at our site analytics to see which stories are performing the best. I check our statistics weekly to understand why stories are getting more views and why some aren't. The answer typically lies in the quality of writing, images and relevancy of the topic (although, we always strive for every story to be relevant) Our analytics look like this:
Multimedia and Social Media
Since my sophomore year on staff, I have improved and expanded my multimedia and social media skills. Within three multimedia categories at the Minnesota High School Press Association convention, I have placed in all three for my videos and my story about our ultimate team. I've led presentations in class about taking advantage of free multimedia tools such as KnightLab and Playbuzz, which I've used in stories about a local Mapping Prejudice project and an ultimate game.
Multimedia examples by me
Social media engagement
Across our social media platforms, I have posted highly liked and viewed photos and videos. I enjoy making mini videos that I post on Instagram that tease a video I have created and I put the link to the full video in our biography to drive traffic towards our YouTube channel, which has increased the views for our videos drastically. Below I've included examples of social media posts I've created that were highly liked or drove traffic towards YouTube. By no means are these every single post I've ever written for the past four years, but rather these are my best and most engaging posts.
From the Instagram post above, my video got 375 views on YouTube, and I credit much of those views from the tease on social media.
The Instagram post above prompted followers to view the full video on YouTube which got 105 views. The Facebook post to the left, which features the volleyball team I was captain of this past fall, got 22 likes and over 1000 people engaged with the post. Although I was on the team, I posted the photo and stats on Facebook to promote awareness, and later our school's marketing team added the post to their page.