High school newspaper beta website critique

[garretruh]

A little background first. We're a medium size high school newspaper with 52 staff. Issues go out once a month with roughy 50 articles each issue. Our current website is produced using Web Studio (Windows) from Back to Beach Software (current website @ www.sahsponyexpress.com). Each section (Cover, News, Opinion, etc.) is produced by a different "web editor".

I personally dislike both the software and the online production setup. The software repeatedly crashes (probably a hardware issue, older PC's and so) and the web design is non-standard. Over the last few weeks I've been putting together a WordPress based site with an improved workflow. I've been using the tools provided by William P. Davis (Bangor Daily News - http://dev.bangordailynews.com/) to periodically pull articles from Google Docs into WordPress and the Edit Flow plugin to streamline the workflow.

I'd appreciate a critique of the experimental site. It's located at www.transversal.me/pe/.

Just FYI, I'm currently working solo on the site, and so as of yet, I haven't had time to insert images into any of the posts (the only ones up now are for the articles in the featured posts slider and those are only featured images). The ads also are simply placeholders from ads found online.

If you've got an iPad handy, there is an OnSwipe produced version of the site. It should automatically redirect. The OnSwipe version is extremely buggy, so don't expect much.

 

[TwinMonkeys]

I would think that "Home" and "Cover" in the navigation menu should be combined into one link?

Anyway, I think its a substantial improvement. I would look at revisiting the main Pony Express font and logo placement, but that's just me.

FYI, you have some unclosed tag or something on this page.

http://transversal.me/pe/?p=40345

See at the top of the screen you can see "Read More" where it shouldn't be.

 

[garretruh]

1. The unclosed tag should be gone now.

2. I agree that its weird having Home and Cover as separate tabs/pages, but I haven't yet figured out a solution. The problem is that there exists a "cover" section at all. If there was no "cover" section, then the articles in that section would have no place to reside. Any ideas on how to resolve the issue?

 

[garretruh]

Another aspect of the site I'd like to improve is the category pages. Right now, they are really bland, even if there was a feature image for each article. If anybody has any ideas for those, they'd be greatly appreciated.