Guidelines for building a Wordpress website that works for you

Social Media

Guidelines

This semester, you will use your Wordpress website for several reasons:

•       Build a portfolio
•       Turn in your homework
•       Create a platform to share information with your students
•       Share your vision and voice

Consider these guidelines to help you find and organize your website.

Step One:

Template. It is very important you choose the right template; it could become a part of your portfolio/resume. 

• Spend at least an hour searching through various templates until you find one that works for you
• Make sure it’s easy to read and follow
• Keep it simply organized
• It absolutely needs to be photo friendly
• Stay away from websites designed for marketing or selling stuff
• Don’t feel you need to select the first one you find. Go through them until you find the right fit
• When you do find one you like, but then decide two weeks later it doesn’t work, then change it
• Spend the first month getting to understand and know your website. Experiment!

Lori King's website: With dynamic photo and menu

Step Two:

Homepage or cover page? When a visitor lands on your blog, what will they see? Will it begin with a cover page, with a dynamic photo and a menu like what on the right? Or a homepage, with a menu for the various pages? Or will visitors be greeted with your blog and social media right away?

Consider these options:

Visuals and Voices – This doesn’t have a homepage

Lori King’s Website – This one does

King’s Klass Blog – This is a true blog, not a website

King's Klass Blog: All elements on homepage

Step Three:

Blog. Once you’ve chosen your homepage option, then add a blog, or not.

Some websites are blogs, while others have separate pages for blogs. You have to decide which one works for you. Whatever you decide, your blog posts need to be found fast and easy, because this is where you will post 99% of your essays and photos.

Step Four:

Twitter. Your Twitter feed should be on the homepage.

Visitors need to be able to read your most recent Tweets. They also should be able to click on your name to go directly to your Twitter feed.

Remember the following requirements:

• Upload professional headshot
• Brief but informative description
• Include Website URL in your description
• Include required hashtags in every post
• Follow @intro2pj + five others from my feed

Step Five:

Instagram. Your Instagram feed should be on the homepage.

Visitors need to be able to view your most recent Instagram posts. They should also be able to click on your name to go directly to your Instagram feed.

Remember the following requirements:

• Upload professional headshot
• Brief but informative description. This can be the same as your Twitter description
• Include Website URL in your description
• You must post a first photo to make it active on your website
• Open a new account if your original account is mostly selfies and personal content
• Follow @toledophotog + five others from my feed

Prezi presentation on social media

Your Wordpress: The site that binds

Steller offers visual storytelling app (outdated)

   There's a cool app in Apple town, and I like it.
   As a photojournalism and multimedia instructor, I'm always searching for different ways to present and share visual storytelling content. It is certainly a challenge keeping up with the multitude of new multimedia tools constantly being developed. 

   This blog post is about just one of those tools, the Steller app for the iPhone and iPod Touch, released in 2014, and now it's available for the Android.

   This mobile-first digital storytelling app combines text, photos and videos in a clean, visually-appealing format. The story includes a title page, and up to a total of 20 pages that are taken directly from your iPhone photo collection. 

   Once you download the free app, you hit the + button in the bottom middle of the page, choose your first image or text page, select your design your story, and continue selecting each page one at a time. You can design the page as you go, or go back to it later to delete or add pages. Once you are finished, Preview and the Publish. You can then share to Twitter, Facebook or your blog. It is that simple.

   The beauty of this app is that you view the story like you're reading a book. The pages turn!
There are a few drawbacks, though:

• Viewers not familiar with the app don't know that the story needs to be manually opened, and the pages turned by swiping the page or hitting the right or left computer arrows. 
• You can't share the complete story on Instagram (at least that's how it used to be); only a single page selected from the story.
• The videos loop, and viewers might not know to swipe out of them.
• Shooting vertical video makes more sense here because you can fill the entire screen. If you shoot horizontal, there's too much white space top and bottom.
• The archiving of these stories is worrisome. How long will this app survive? But this isn't a big problem because this app was chosen as one of the Best Apps of 2014 by Apple, and you still have the original images in your phone's photo gallery. 
• Elements in stories published back in 2014 to at least 2016 are now outdated, thus you really shouldn't try editing them. You'll get this message: "You are editing an old story with outdated themes and features. Some functionality will be restricted.
• And in 2019, your free themes are limited to two: classico and Noir.

   Photojournalists don't have a lot of input over how our photos are published on the web and in the newspaper. But this app gives us back a little power. 

   Consider the many ways visual stories can be told. Take, for example, at this high school basketball game I shot, there were four ways my photos were published:

Screen grab from Toledo Blade newspaper's front sports page.

1. Instagram. I decided to start out by shooting from a high angle, so I went to the top of the bleachers, in a corner facing the basket. I took a panoramic photo with my cell and posted it on Instagram.
2. Steller. Then I remembered the Steller app. To tell a different story, I avoided being redundant with images, shooting photos and videos with my phone that I wouldn't have shot with my two DSLRs. 
3. Toledo Blade newspaper. Because we have an early deadline for the print version of the newspaper, I transmitted my best 12 photos from the first two periods via Photo Mechanic FTP using an air card. This caused me to miss the entire third period.
4. Toledo Blade website. I continued shooting in the fourth period, and sent the rest of the images for a photo gallery on the website.

   This app can be a powerful way to get our social media savvy youth, who often turn to YouTube and Snapchat for their 'news,' to view real stories about real people, places and things. And it's a fun way for us veteran shooters to have fun, too!

   For these reasons, I'm think this storytelling app is worth using and teaching.
Here are a few links to stories and reviews on Steller (though these links are dated, as well):
JEA Digital Media article on Steller
Storybench story on Steller and mobile reporting
Tutorials on the VSCO Cam app 

Summer: Time to reflect, rebuild and replenish the journalism toolbox

Screen grab of a social media tool search.

   Summer.

   For many college students on break, summer is all about relaxing, partying, traveling or working for tuition money.
   Unless they are attending summer school, there is no homework to ruin much-needed downtime for the brain.

   But for university instructors (and I probably speak for many), much of our summer is spent doing homework.

   I use summer to catch up on what’s new in the journalism industry, and to update lesson plans that reflect modern trends of storytelling.

   Thinking back, it seemed that being a journalism student was less tasking in the good ole days. Now I’m simplifying here, but we students primarily learned the traditional skills of interviewing, writing and editing. The basic tools included a typewriter, paper and pens for reporters; and a film camera and wet darkroom for photojournalists.

   And back then only editors had the capacity to design and disseminate news on a printed page. Oh, how I remember those design tools fondly: Xacto knives, pica poles and whiz wheels… oh my.

   I will never forget the beloved Xacto knife, which nearly cut off a couple of my fingers while finishing a page design for The Huachuca Scout military newspaper in Arizona. Not a fond memory.

   But journalism tools now a days? OH… MY… GOD!

   There are so many (countless, really) that I fear it’s impossible to teach students everything they need to know to succeed in the 21^st Century. How can we possibly keep up with the industry standards when there are so, so many tools?

   Social media tools are supposed to make our lives easier, right? There is no doubt they are a necessity. So, I’m thinking the best plan is to keep it simple.
   I recently read somewhere that journalists shouldn’t maintain more than three social media tools at a time. If I go by that advise, then I need to determine the most important social media tools that I think students should know. Are they Twitter, Facebook and Instagram? Snap Chat is wanting in on the game now, and You Tube is no slouch.  

   And how we need to contain them? Consider Rebel Mouse and TweetDeck.

  Need to congregate a bunch of similar topics together, or looking for similar topics to add to your story? Try Storify or Storyful.

  How about live storytelling? Download Evrybit or Periscope on your smart phones.

  Do you get my point?

   I decided to write this blog post because I was searching for new tools to teach my photojournalism students next semester, and I wanted to share that I’ve found more than I bargained for.