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.

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.

So you want to bring all this new media stuff to your high school newspaper. Where do you even start? First, you gotta get a website.

While working with some students at a high school in Austin, Texas, I was surprised to hear that they were worried about starting a website because they were so attached to the print newspaper. But you guys are young, I was thinking. You grew up with a mouse in your hand. You’re not supposed to love newspapers. But they do, or they wouldn’t be in a high school newspaper classroom. It took a while to convince them that convergence could mean better journalism in addition to the print edition, not instead. As an aside, I’m glad they love newspapers because that means print journalism has a chance. (Conversely, posts like these, where a high school journalist is worried about an entire program disappearing, make me sad. Let’s reinvigorate high school journalism programs so this doesn’t happen.)

Where to start?

Eventually we set to work on building a website. We experimented, and through trial and error came up with a method that worked best. Today’s important and timely webinar by Paly Voice (pictured above) adviser Paul Kandell for the High School Broadcast Journalism Project confirmed what we found.

A free option

The first thing we tried was the free hosting service through ASNE’s My High School Journalism. It was quick, easy and did I mention free?

Here’s an example of what the site looks like. This is a great service that ASNE provides, but ultimately the students and I agreed that to make the publication their own, they needed a more flexible format. The biggest downside to doing a site on myhsj.org  is that you’re limited in design and features. I think of this as a starter site to get students used to posting on the internet and thinking about how they want to design their own site. Apparently a lot of other programs have had the same experience because the first several I clicked on hadn’t been updated in months or even years.

A pricier option

I learned about another site that hosts and designs high school newspaper websites in today’s webinar. I saw the price and was happy we hadn’t been tempted. For a $600 setup fee and $200 a year, schoolnewspapersonline.com will host your newspaper’s website.

This option offers more flexibility by giving a choice of website templates, but the cost is high, and you can set up similar websites through WordPress for a lot less.

A happy medium

Which is what we eventually turned to. WordPress is a publishing platform that’s user-friendly and requires minimum to no knowledge of html coding. But even with WordPress, there are two options, and we tried both.

The first and easiest option is to create a blog on WordPress.com. You choose a theme, or layout, based on the free ones available, and WordPress hosts your site for free.  There’s even an option to buy a domain name so you don’t have “WordPress” in the url. Again, this is a great starter site to get students used to updating a website. But again, we were frustrated with the lack of flexibility in designing the site, and most of the free themes available looked too much like blogs for the students’ tastes.

The students ultimately built the site the same way I created this one, by downloading the WordPress software from WordPress.org, buying a domain name for $10, finding a website hosting company to purchase web space  (for about $60 a year), and downloading a premium WordPress theme for about $70. (I like the news and magazine themes that Woothemes sells, but you can find them easily by googling “WordPress themes.”) Some are cheaper; some are more expensive. WordPress.org goes into detail about how to find a hosting company and buy a domain, so I won’t bore you about it here. The students’ website is still a work in progress, as is mine, but here’s what theirs looked like shortly after creating the site:

So for about $170 start-up costs and less than $100 a year for the domain and hosting service, you get a quality website with multimedia capabilities, no html required.

If you’ve had a good (or bad) experience with creating a high school newspaper website in another way, please take a moment to share what you’ve learned.