What are your readership stats?
Our print circulation is 85,000. Some stats on the new online version: (since we launched in July 2009)

4, 536 visits
8,489 pageviews
3,262 unique visitors
7 comments

35.95 % of visits are from direct traffic
37.87 % from referring sites (918 from McCombs home page, 188 from Twitter, 131 from Facebook; #5 refererrer: images.google.com)
26.12 % from search engines (1, 185 visits from 877 keywords)

Note: Unfortunately we did not have analytics running on the old site, so I don’t have a benchmark to compare these to.

How long did this take, and what staff members were involved? What other responsibilites do they have?
From the time I sent inspiration sites to our web editor to the day we went live was 6.5 weeks. Both of us had prior experience with WordPress, although he is not a WordPress designer, so was figuring out a lot as he went along. One of our web designers stepped in for a few hours to help with some technical difficulties. Our web editor spent a few hours here and there researching theme (template) options and testing them on our servers. After that, he spent about 5 days customizing it and making tweaks, while I uploaded all the content and also helped tweak. Our web editor has many other responsibilities, and I’d say the magazine is about 50-60% of my job.

How easy is it for someone with little IT experience to build and use a site in WordPress?
Very easy. If you can operate in Microsoft Word, you can operate in WordPress. We have more than 10 blogs at McCombs running on WordPress, and almost all are managed by people with little to no IT training.

How do you promote the online magazine?
We announced it in our weekly news e-mail that goes to all faculty, staff and students. The alumni relations team also included it in their monthly e-mail to alumni. Two of the feature stories were promintently highlighted on the McCombs home page for a few months. We also linked to it from our blog, Facebook and Twitter.

Does the content mirror your magazine?  Are there web extras?  Is anything in the magazine that’s not online?
The online content mirrors the print version very closely, but there are a few extras. In this issue, it’s mainly videos. In the future that might be photo slideshows, article sidebars, podcasts, polls and more. We put basically all of the print content in the online version.

Is it updated or changed more often than the magazine?
In the past, it wasn’t really feasible to update the Web version more often than the print (too much of a hassle). But it’s something we hope to do in the future.

Can you give different people different access levels?
Yes. One level can create a post, but not publish it. Another level can create and publish, but not access design, etc. Check out this post for a more detailed explanation.

Was it costly to create the site?
It was entirely free! WordPress is free, and so is the theme we chose. There are themes that cost money, and if we hadn’t had someone on staff familiar with the technology, we would have needed to hire a freelancer to customize the template.

What template did you use? Did you customize it?
We used the Branford Magazine theme, and added a small amount of customization.

What files that I prepare for the printer can be used to create my WordPress magazine?
Wordpress gets persnickety and can garble your content if you copy and paste directly from a Web page, email or even a Word doc. And although there is a “Copy as Plain Text” option on the WordPress dashboard, it doesn’t always work. So I always copy content, either from Word, if I have a fairly clean copy, or from a PDF from the printer/designer if there were a lot of late changes. Then I paste to Microsoft Notepad, my computer’s plain text editor. That strips out all the formatting so I don’t drag any hidden code to the WordPress post.

Photos may need to be resized or compressed to web-appropriate sizes.

Is it possible to link to previous versions not in WordPress that are already on the web?
Yes. We created an Archive page that just links to all previous issues.

If links from section to section or to another magazine page are broken or not there, who fixes it?
In our case, I fix it. The WordPress platform makes it very easy and intutive to create hyperlinks, so it’s just as easy to fix them.

Our web editor, Jason Molin, is working on an FAQ with a more technical focus (servers, php–things I know not of), so check his McCombs Web Works blog next week for those answers.

Resources

Other WordPress publications (I’m an alumni magazine editor, so those make up most of my links):

Duke Research

Outreach (Georgia)

Swarthmore

Johns Hopkins Magazine

My ongoing list of alumni magazines using WordPress on Delicious

WordPress magazine showcase
WordPress theme directory (search “magazine”)
Bestwpthemes.com free and premium magazine themes

And a special plug for the CASE College and University Editors (CUE) listserv, a community of amazingly talented and helpful people, many of whom we drew inspiration from for our own magazine.

But the fun doesn’t stop there. Thanks to this phenomenon called the Internet (I think it’s gonna be big), I also oversee the publication of our magazine online. Since it’s nearly all the same content and we’ve already completed the editing and proofreading, it should be no sweat to get the thing online, right?

Wrong. Not having a web team devoted solely to the magazine, it was always a scramble. But for our most recent issue, we changed gears and used the WordPress blogging platform to host and publish the magazine.

I’m happy to say we’re thrilled with the result. I know a lot of print magazine editors are struggling with how to publish online, so I decided to chronicle our process here. This isn’t meant to be an all-encompassing explanation of WordPress-hosted magazines, but simply a case study of our experience. Hopefully it’s helpful to others facing similar issues.

Where We Started

First, a look at how our magazine Web presence has evolved:

1998 – No images, single column of text

1999 – Thumbnail images, departments sidebar

2006 – Larger images, all content on front page

These sites were perfectly fine, and could even be considered somewhat advanced, given that many university magazines aren’t online at all or only exist on the web in PDF format. But there were key factors that just weren’t working.

Old Model

Dependent on web team
I’m not a web person, so our web team had to do all the work to create static html pages. But since they weren’t familiar with each issue’s content, I had to do extra work to specify what I wanted for every aspect of every page: urls, tagging, keywords, descriptions, title tags, photo selection, etc. Also, the magazine site was not a priority for them, so the whole process lacked a certain enthusiasm on both sides.

Time-intensive
All of that coding and creation of pages was tedious work, and it had to happen twice a year. Then, once the pages were up, I had to go in and proofread everything all over again. Going back and forth with a web designer over every typo, broken link, forgotten title tag or awkward formatting was a massive time-suck.

Little connection to print version, not very visual
The old version didn’t feel like an online magazine, and, except for a small image of our flag at the top of the page, didn’t feel like our magazine.

Lack of flexibility
Because it was such a laborious process, once the magazine was up, we just left it alone. No one bothered to think about ways to update it more regularly, because it just didn’t seem like a good use of time.

No reader engagement
Did you love or hate that article? Do you have some insight that might shed more light on the topic? Too bad, keep it to yourself. Our old model had no way for users to leave instant feedback and comments.

New Model

Using WordPress to host our magazine content radically changed both the publishing process and the final product.

2009 – Large images, modules highlighting each department, multimedia elements

We’re in control
Uploading content to a WordPress blog requires very little technical know-how. Because it creates pages for me, I was able to upload all the content myself and in a more timely manner. And the web team got to be free of a project they didn’t want. 

Very visual, more magaziney
We chose the Branford template, which was designed specifically for online magazines. Big images, customizable accent colors and a sidebar to serve as the table of contents. Now it looks like a magazine and the overall impression is more closely connected to the look and feel of the print version.

Easy updates and search engine optimization
We only publish the print version twice a year, but we’d like the online magazine to include more dynamic content. With the WordPress platform acting as a CMS, it’s a snap to post new content or make adjustments to existing articles.

And the WordPress SEO tools help our articles turn up higher in search results. Search engines have accounted for more than a quarter of our site visits, and readers have found us using more than 800 different keywords. Hello, new audience!

Built-in templates, tools and and add-ons
Because there are thousands of WordPress templates–also called themes–available (many for free, including the one we used), you can create a snazzy site without starting from scratch. And if you think of a feature you want, either on the back end (like spam protection) or the front end (like a tag cloud), there’s probably a simple plug-in you can install to make it happen. Reinvention of the wheel not necessary.

Interactive
The built-in commenting feature makes it easy for readers to respond to content. Ok, so we’ve only had seven comments so far, but that’s seven more than we’ve ever had before!

So that takes care of some of the strategy and explanation of why we used WordPress. Now how on earth does it work, and what if I don’t know anything about technology? Read Part II, where I answer some FAQs about skill level, time, cost and other factors. It’s also got a list of other online magazines using WordPress and some links to help find a theme for your WordPress magazine.