If you’re a regular reader of this blog (Does this blog have regular readers?), you might have noticed that updates have been a bit… scarce. And while I suppose I don’t really have much excuse aside from general laziness, I have been very busy with other projects. One of which, a website for a new student  fashion publication called Helium Magazine, is finally finished to the point where I can start to focus on other things. (School, family life, sleep, personal hygene, etc.) So consequentially my blog might be a tad more active now.

Yay.

While the magazine is still very much an on-going project, with two fashion shows in the works and a first print issue to produce, my first responsibility as web editor has been accomplished. The site is up, and it looks good. A plan for posting has been established, and aside for a few hiccups, things seem to be running smoothly.

That being the case, I thought I’d take a little time to highlight the things I learned from this project so far, so that other people thinking of starting student publications can benefit. Building websites, and indeed launching media products, is a little bit above and beyond for most journalism students.  But it’s fun, gives you more creative control than you might find at what your school already offers, and it teaches you the sort of management and organization skills you need to get ahead once you leave school.  Besides, it’s great resume fodder.

1. You can do it

It seems daunting, but all you really need to start a publication, be it web or print based, is a stable of people willing to work on it. There’s money, too, of course, but you’d probably be surprised both at how cheaply things can be done and how much money is actually available. Websites, in particular, are cheap; you can find hosting for as low as thirty bucks a year, and if you aren’t going to be doing substantial promotion or events that might be your only expense.

If you are, there’s a chance you can get things done on the cheap by offering partnerships to people you might otherwise end up paying. In our case, we’re working with a pretty nice photo studio and an event planning company, both of which have offered their services gratis providing we give them free promotion. College students tend to be a sought-after advertising demographic, so by trading services this way, everyone benefits.

For everything else, see if you can get the school to foot the bill. There’s always grants, after all. You might want to consider going through the process to become a school club. This will generally get you discounts on renting space for events on campus, might provide you with a meeting space, and your organization sounds more legit under the semi-official aegis of the school. Plus, a lot of times the AS has money to spend on campus groups. See if you can get them to spend it on you.

2. Choose a good blogging engine

Blog platforms are pretty uniquely suited to the needs of a college publication. After all, what you’re going to be doing is creating a website with periodically updated with new articles, and what is that but a blog site? More importantly, most of the best blog programs are free.

You might be tempted to go with a more full-service CMS like Joomla, which is also free and gives you more options as far as site structure goes. It’s been my experience that these are more than you need, however, and they add a level of complexity that you don’t want. Ideally, you want your publication to last after you’ve moved on, and if you’re the only one that understands how to work the site, that’s not going to happen.

Besides, you don’t want to be the one solely charged with updating the thing when there are so many more interesting ways to spend your time. Like clipping your toenails. Or standing in line at the bank.  Blog engines give you just enough flexibility when designing to make a cool site without providing a barrier to entry for the less tech-savvy members of your team.

In our case, the Helium website runs on Wordpress, with a fairly heavily modified visual theme installed. Wordpress was chosen primarily for ease of use, and because it was the blog engine we were most familiar with. It’s not the only game in town, however. MovableType is another very popular blog setup, and it’s an excellent choice. In all honesty, MovableType is almost better for this sort of website, since it was designed from the ground up for use by multiple users, whereas Wordpress is aimed primarily at the personal blogs like the one you’re reading now. WordpressMU is a recently-released solution for multi-user sites, but I’m not familiar enough with it to pass judgment. You really can’t go wrong either way.

If you’re really not comfortable with you’re web design skills, Blogger is about as easy as it gets. I’d avoid using Blogger if you can though. The other ones really aren’t that much harder to learn, and having a Blogger site is about as impressive as having a myspace page.

3. Set deadlines…

…but be realistic about them. This is probably the most important thing, because you aren’t paying anyone anything to work with you on the publication. Your team, therefor, is working primarily for the satisfaction of having accomplished something. Regular deadlines let everyone feel like they’re doing something, and keep the entire project moving along. Creating something new is a process, and if you’re only looking far down the line to the eventual payoff, you run the risk of losing focus and energy before you ever get to it.

In our case, the website wasn’t ready for several weeks, but we made sure that everyone was working on something, teaching the rudiments of blog writing and working on the scope of people’s recurring features before there was even a place to put them. That meant that not only was everyone still working, but we had a lot of content ready by the time the site was actually up.

By the same token, be realistic about the time frame in which you can accomplish things, and be flexible enough to change your plans when it becomes obvious you need to. Again, in our case we had set a hard deadline of two weeks for web development, but it turned out there were a lot more issues with the theme then we had anticipated, and things had to be pushed back another week. We probably could have made things easier on ourselves by setting the deadline once we were more familiar with the task. The running countdown on our “coming soon” site, while a good way to build hype, was probably also not a good idea since we weren’t sure we could deliver.

In the end, it all worked out, but it was a tense couple of weeks.