Ptah Dunbar

In my attempt at making a WordPress news theme, the first thing I thought about was what’s in a news website?

Looking through several actual news websites, I took note on some of the elements that make those news website, well a news website.

First Let’s take a look at what are the things you’ll see when visiting these types of websites.
I’m going to assume readers are browsing at at least 1024×768 screen resolution which should be minimum standard nowadays.

CNN (www.cnn.com)

NY Times (nytimes.com)

ABC news (abcnews.go.com)

TIME (www.time.com)

MSNBC (www.msnbc.msn.com)

Newsweek (www.newsweek.com)

Reuters (www.reuters.com)

Washington Post (www.washingtonpost.com)

Guardian (www.guardian.co.uk)

The Wall Street Journal (online.wsj.com/public/us)

Bloomberg (bloomberg.com)

Times Online (www.timesonline.co.uk)

International Herald Tribune (www.iht.com)

AOL News (news.aol.com)

BBC Beta (www.bbc.co.uk/home/beta/)

News (news.com)

CBS News (www.cbsnews.com)

So what do they all have in common?

• Today’s date + when pages were last updated
• Latest News (of course)
• Advertisements
• Video
• Most popular
• Top Stories
• Short aggregated list of other topics they cover

Great. So now that we know what an actual news website should be populated with, we can convert those elements to WordPress and those will be the features that’ll be included in my premium WordPress news theme. Knowing the basic concept for the Homepage is to leur readers into the website. It’s like a portal in a sense.

Design
I already have an idea of how I want the design to look like, but ultimately, it’s not for me to decide, it’s going to be for you. So I’ll make sure to have it flexible enough as to where you can change/move things around. It’ll be great. I won’t get into how every things going to work, as for I’m not even sure! lol. I’ll update you on that in the near future.

Getting started
The goal for this project is to create a premium news theme aimed at small publishing companies to get their content out fast, easy, and elegant. I just brought the domain so the project is official. Now I’m phasing into the planning stage where I map everything out and figure out all how I’m going to make all this work. In the next article about my news theme, I’ll update you some previews along with a name for this bad boy.

Time frame
I’m giving myself a month starting today to have a working basic version up and running. That should give the competition more than enough time to catch up. In the meantime, I’ve got other activities going on during that time like the launch of my first free theme, featured client projects that I’m working on, and some more.

If you’d like to have any features in addition to those mentioned above, drop a line in the comments below and I’ll let you know if it’s possible.

UPDATE: I thought I might add Cleversage’s article “20 Free & Premium Magazine-Style WordPress Themes” to the list. There’s a couple of wp themes I didn’t know exist. I’ll be sure to check them out.