Covers that sell

INKISH.NEWS started as an idea more than a year ago, and many things have gone through my head. One thing is the technical side of the development. How difficult is this, and how expensive is it, and how long time will it take before we reach a critical mass of both users and contributors. In this short article, I speculate a bit over the look and feel of INKISH.NEWS.

The more freedom you give a user (design-wise), the more difficult it will be to control the overall look of INKISH.NEWS. From a brand-perspective this is of course an issue, but if you believe in the power of words, you simply have to use the words to educate, to share, to convince your audience.

We have only made two major decisions in relation to the design. The first thing is the dark overlay we have put on all thumbnails on the front page. This we have done to give some sort of consistency on INKISH.NEWS and also to be certain that the text overlays we deliver can be read.

The other design decision we have made - at least for the first version - is to limit font to only Helvetica.

I, of course, understand that some will argue against both decisions, but we have to start a place. I also have from some of the testers got a concern over another major decision we have made, namely the fact that you can't directly copy/paste a formatted word document into NEWS:

You can actually, but it requires you to open the options menu and then select copy/paste with HTML formatting. So why did we put this option of per default?

Well, the first and most important reason is that we would like everybody to be able to create something consistent but also 'understandable.'

I am not native English as you probably can both read and hear, so I use Grammarly. It's a quite good tool, though some of my American friends tell me that it isn't accurate. But when using Grammarly and then copy/paste proofed text, hidden HTML characters are also copied. I discovered that our online drag'n'drop tool has difficulties handling DIVS that are not aligned with our development. The result - tables that looks stupid and more crazy things.

That's why we took that decision. You can copy/paste if you choose to from the Option menu above.

However. When you create an article you can put as many pictured here as you like.That is 100% good. When you click Save/update your article you will be prompted to upload a "cover" photo. Our cover photos or thumbnails are the ones that are shown on the front, the ones that are used when articles are shared, etc.

Ladies, and gentlemen. The thumbnails should look GREAT. Have consistency in your covers, so people right away understand that you are the author. Make covers that clearly indicate what the article is about, and finally, I believe you should make covers that looks nice. Nice is, of course, very much up to personal taste, but we i.e. always try to have people on our covers, because our slogan on INKISH.TV is 'We Are People' - so I believe that makes sense.

In one of the very nearby version upgrades of INKISH.NEWS we will add a feature enabling readers to rate articles. Maybe we should include a competition about the best covers, and best stories?

Sep 11, 2019

Author: Morten Reitoft