After several weeks of reviewing high school news websites, I am even more excited about the future of journalism. There are some high school sites out there that rival the professional news sites in their respective towns, and some that could stand up against the best metro newspaper and news start-up sites. These high school journalists really get the importance of design, fresh content, interactivity and multimedia.

My attention was focused on sites in one state, but recently, winners and finalists in national contests were announced by the Columbia Scholastic Press Association and the National Scholastic Press Association. Would-be online student (and even professional) journalists could learn a lot from perusing the winning sites.

I learned even more from looking at  sites-in-progress that were almost there but had a little bit of work to do in some key areas.

Here are seven ways to improve a high school site:

1. Captions, captions, captions.

Every photo needs a caption. Even those in galleries and slideshows. Need a free gallery editor that allows captions? The Online Journalism Review has you covered with a review of several free apps. While we’re on the subject of photos, post more, and allow readers to upload their own, too.

2. Write headlines for online.

Writing good newspaper headlines is a unique and important skill, but unlike in print, the online reader doesn’t have the  subhead, photo and lead of the story in view to give the necessary context to decide whether to read further. Be specific. Learn more here and here.

3. Break up text.

Please, please, please don’t subject readers to an intimidating screen of text. Break up stories with subheads, photos, graphics, maps, video. I’m not sure if this interesting model of storytelling will catch on, but if we want readers to read the stories writers work so hard on, shouldn’t the text be as easy to read as possible?

4. Keep readers coming back with frequent updates.

Putting out a scholastic newspaper is tough. And adding a website on top of that? Needless to say, journalism advisers’ salaries would be on par with football coaches if paid by the hour. But if you’re going to do a website, really do the website. None of this uploading the print newspaper stories every six weeks. To have a working, relevant site, there’s got to be fresh content. (But don’t get rid of the print edition if you don’t have to.)

5. Add more multimedia features.

Become an expert in multimedia by reading this free guide then practicing consitantly. Online journalism guru Mindy McAdams keeps more stellar tips on the Journalists’ Toolkit site, and a recent Twitter chat about multimedia tools brought up some great points and introduced some cool tools.

6. Be more social.

Live chats, tweets, Facebook pages and other social media tools are excellent tools to bring readers to the site, find sources and facilitate a community conversation. Can’t do much better than reading these 32 posts about social media from JEA Digital Media.

7. Move beyond my.hsj.org.

This might be controversial. I think ASNE’s free web service for scholastic journalism is so necessary and awesome, but once staffers get the hang of posting content regularly to the newspaper’s my.hsj.org site,  it wouldn’t hurt to experiment with content-management systems and build a site through WordPress or Joomla. It’s becoming more and more important for journalists to have experience with content-management systems and web design, and building a site gives students a head-start developing these skills. Here’s a great resource on building a site, and a story sharing one school’s experience evaluating online options.

If you’re lucky enough to have the students, time and resources to devote an entire class to online journalism, what should you teach?

Course standards

In Texas, we don’t have standards yet for an online class, although I’ve come up with a proposal for what those official standards could look like: onlinestandards.doc (Following the online news course in the document, I have included how I would change the existing standards for current journalism courses.)

Curriculum

Writing a curriculum is challenging because journalism is changing so much that course work needs revision each year. What follows is a perpetually changing plan for an introductory online journalism course based on six six-week grading periods over two semesters. I organized the plan to expose students to a broad range of areas in web journalism. The weekly topics could be amended to spend more or less time on certain subjects, depending on the course and students. I’d love your feedback on things to add or subtract: curriculumonlineclass.xls

Resources

For textbooks, Journalism Next by Mark Briggs and the newly published Digital Journalist’s Handbook by Mark S. Luckie would do just fine, in addition to web resources. To create lesson plans and assignments, Mindy McAdams’ compilation of resources is endlessly useful.

Being a former newspaper reporter, I have little experience designing a website.  Newsrooms today tend to be segregated: content-creators, or reporters and writers, get to go out in the field and come up with stories to write, but later,they and their editors have no say in where the stories show up on the website. This is done by tech people who may or may not have backgrounds as reporters, photographers or assignment editors. (I believe this will change as more journalists become tech people.)

This might account for the dearth in tips on website design in the latest books on multimedia and online journalism. High school journalists, on the other hand, not only have to learn to become proficient in multimedia journalism and social networking, they also have to in many cases build the website.

Here are some tips I learned over the weekend catching up on web design via usability expert Steve Krug’s book Don’t Make Me Think.

You want the site to make readers think as little as possible. Make links obvious, searches painless and page titles self-explanatory. Even a second of internal debate about whether a button will take you to a story or having to decipher “Quick search” versus the simple “Search” can turn readers off.

Home pages have a lot to accomplish. Right off, the site’s identity (in the top left corner) and explanation of its purpose should tell readers exactly what they will find on the site. Home page should also have search box, clear site hierarchy showing available content and features, teases to stories within the site, fresh content to show the site is updated regularly, shortcuts to the most read content, a clear entry-point for where readers should start… Whew! And all this stuff has to be easy to find.

Test the site. Companies pay big bucks for usability tests, where they record average people trying to navigate the site. This would be a great activity for the web designer and editors to do every semester with student volunteers. Krug gives step-by-step directions on how to do this.

The book is geared toward corporate websites, but if students could master the techniques in the book to make websites more user-friendly, their sites would be more enticing than a lot of professional ones out there.  Now excuse me while I go work on this site and my professional writing website to incorporate some of this stuff.