Yes, You Can Have a Washington Post Quality Website!
They spent millions. You can do it for $79.95.
I’ve written a lot about WordPress and how it can help you create and manage a terrific website. To illustrate what’s possible, we’ll take a look at the Revolution set of themes built on top of WordPress and one actual user, ImWritingSports.
Basically, each website has two core elements: What you see up front and what goes on behind the scenes.
When you visit the Washington Post website you see a well designed, easy to understand, news-style website. Behind the scenes, resides a very sophisticated content management system that would’ve been custom built. We don’t know exactly how much time and money they spent to get there. But it was surely many months and millions of dollars.
You may not have millions to spend, but even large corporations don’t want to invest that kind of money in a new website. You don’t have to make that investment because some very talented people have done it for you and will provide exactly what you need for much less than you probably spend at Starbucks each year.
In this case, showing is better than telling. Here’s the Revolution magazine theme:
Here’s the Revolution news theme:
Here is an actual site built with the Revolution tool set. It is written and managed by a 22 year old journalism student, ImWritingSports. The cost–$79.99.
Here is the behind the scenes look at how I manage this site using the WordPress content management system; it shows it shows the actual editing tool with this article. You can do everything easily including placing the images in your articles.
The hard part of keeping the site current is the writing of the articles. The easy part is posting them to the site and keeping everything organized. In fact, I can produce the newsletter in 5 minutes, once the content is written.
You can create a much better, much more easily managed website than you have ever imagined, using content management and content creation tools that are readily available on the web. You can select your favorite look and feel from outstanding websites, such as the Washington Post, and come pretty darn close to replicating their quality. And, you can do it for peanuts. What are you waiting for?
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Comments [6]
Thanks for the feature! I just realized something, I was messing around with the layout, and I missed a div tag, and you grabbed this photo right during the 30 seconds it was messed up! That’s alright though, but you can see a photo at the bottom of the tab section
Great post, Newt! I’ve been using the Revolution theme on my site for about a month now, and my podcast audience (and new visitors to the site) enjoy it. The strength of the Revolution themes are two-fold: there are several “flavors” to choose from, depending on customer need … and while they are WP-powered, none of the Revolution themes feel “bloggy.” This pro-quality look sets Revolution users apart from the pack. An excellent theme.
Thanks again for the post!
Nick,
You’re welcome. How much time did it take you to build out your site once you had uploaded the theme?
Newt
Thanks for the comment, J.C. I checked out your site. Very impressive. How the heck do you make money with all those free podcasts? Why is your print version not coming out until 2009? Enquiring minds want to know.
Newt
Thanks for the kind words about the site, Newt! Much obliged. As for making money … well, this is truly the long tail in effect. I launched the podcast novel trilogy in Feb. 2006 with the hopes to find an audience. Not only did that happen, but the trilogy’s success attracted the attention of a major NY publisher. I’ll happy provide more details via email, if you’re interested … but it’s my hope that 7th Son’s vociferous fanbase supports the print release next year.
Thanks again for checking out the site!
Newt,
How long did it take? Considering I had upgraded from the Revolution Magazine theme, and the fact that I was already familiar with the ‘engine’s’ that Brian builds, it took me about an hour, at most, to get the site going. The longest part was just making images the proper size. As far as the sidebars, and things like that, I already had the work done from my previous theme. So for the average person with a little CSS knowledge- knowledge is too strong- familiarity with Wordpress themes, I’d guess it’d take about 2-3 hours from top to bottom. Brian has implemented an options panel that takes out all the messy stuff, so it’s not bad. I don’t use the options panel, I got an early copy, and didn’t want to redo all my work, but I have seen it, and it’s very very helpful.