The publisher got his state of The SunBreak address a little while ago, so, as the Editor in Chief, let me take the chance to welcome you to our shiny new WordPress home, and walk you through the home page layout. I’m more than a little proud, in fact, because this theme was created in-house, with the almost supernatural assistance of Mark Rushing, our IT supergenius and Vaughn Aldredge on design/UX. Both are SunBreak readers, so they get to enjoy the fruits of their work.
That masthead is Vaughn’s idea, and allows us to capture something of the print magazine’s glamor-shot cover. The image changes on refresh of the page. Currently the photography is the handiwork of Staff Photographer MvB, but we’ll be inviting our SunBreak Flickr pool members to send in their (990x220px) shots. We just need to establish how we’ll credit them separately, since we can’t hotlink back to Flickr as we would normally do. Below we’ll have an Instivate ad from our favorite Seattle indie ad network, adjacent to quick navigation to our major category pages.
Then we come to our Featured Story (of the day, or hour, depending), which gives us the chance to let a “big news” piece run or draw attention to a feature we just don’t want you to miss. Next that is site search that actually works. Sweet.
Our next level breaks our categories out into a chronological-style headline listing, most recent up top. It’s a skimmable way to see the latest news, made a little more fun with thumbnails. We may or may not hotlink the headers to the category pages. It depends on whether you pester us about it.
Then, to mix things up a big, we have our most viewed stories, most commented (“powered” by Disqus, a de facto standard we’ve had thrust upon us), and a collection of YouTube videos that you can watch while staying on the home page. Go ahead, click on one. It’s like magic! We’re going to be experimenting on how to use the video corner best, but as you can see, the first thought was to celebrate local bands.
We can never thank our Flickr pool members enough, but we decided we could do more to highlight their contributions than we had been. This Flickr strip, again, opens up for you while remaining on the home page. Click! Magic! Below that we watch our Facebook-fan count obsessively. We’ve also turned our weekly On the List coverage into a constantly updating events agenda. Click the link below it and you’ll see the full Google calendar. We’re working on how to better present a month-view; there’s just so much we could get done by launch.
Finally, we close the page with a subscription request (via PayPal) of our more regular readers. It’s on the honor system, but it’s actually working. We just got our first 2-year subscriber last week! Adjacent is our contact footer, reminding me that I should wrap this up because I need to update the RSS feed for our iPhone app! Thanks for stopping in, and be warned–we’re not through yet.
YAY! Awesome look and features. Congrats!