Welcome to Your News Website

By Global Moxie
Posted Thursday, September 21, 2006

We recommend that you print and save this page for future reference.

The "Serious News" skin was designed to meet the needs of a full-featured news site, offering a range of news, features and commentaries. The skin comes prepackaged with a typical roster of sections for a news website, but you can use Big Medium's section editor to tailor the site sections and design to your specific needs.

This article provides an overview of how to use this skin for the best design impact, as well as options for customizing it to match your organization's brand and content.

Your Logo

To replace the "LocalNews.com" graphic with your own logo, create a graphic that is 227 pixels wide and 54 pixels tall, with a white background. To have your graphic appear on the site, you have two options:

1. Load the graphic to the bmadmin/tempimg/localnews-img directory, and name it localnews_logo.gif, replacing the current file of that name. (After making this change, all sites using the Serious News skin on your server will display the new graphic).
   
   or...
2. Load the graphic to a location of your choice on your webserver, and then use Big Medium's Section Editor to update all homepage and main-section templates to point the URL for the logo graphic to your new graphic. To do this, go to the settings page for each section in the Section Editor and, in each template panel for that section, click the "View the Current Template" link. Copy the template to your favorite text editor, make the change, and then save your revised template to your computer's hard drive. Then use the Section Editor to upload the new template. Repeat this process for each template of each main section.

Local Weather

This skin's homepage uses a free service offered by AccuWeather, providing up-to-date local weather for any location in the US (Click here for complete information).

To make the homepage display local weather for your community, use Big Medium's Section Editor to update the homepage template:

1. In the Section Editor, click the "Edit Homepage" link.
2. In the "Homepage Template" panel, click the "View the Current Template" link, and copy it to your favorite text editor.
3. In the text editor, find the <!-- Weather tracker --> comment in the last third of the template. Follow the directions embedded in the HTML of the template to make the necessary adjustments to "localize" your weather.
4. Save the revised template to disk.
5. In the "Homepage Template" panel of the homepage settings page, upload the revised template using the "Browse" button.
6. Rebuild all top-level pages by following the link displayed after you save the homepage settings.

Quotes

This skin uses Big Medium's Tip Editor to display "quotable quotes" on the homepage. To add and edit quotes, click the Tip Editor link in the Big Medium control panel.

Creating New Articles

All of the sections of this skin have subsections, except for the Opinions and About Us sections. When creating a new article, it is recommended that you assign the article to the appropriate subsection of that section, not the main section itself. In other words, do not assign an article to the "News" section, but to "News>Local/State," "News>Nation," etc.

Article Images

For the best results with the display of your images, use these standard sizes for your images:

• Spotlight image: 180 pixels wide (any height is fine).
• Main article image: 180 pixels wide (any height is fine).
• Thumbnail image: 70 pixels wide by 70 pixels high.
• Body image: You may use any dimensions you choose.

Changing Left-Column Text

All pages of this skin, except for the homepage, include some text and links below the left-column navigation. You may edit or remove this text by editing the announcement HTML for each section. To do this:

1. In the Section Editor, click the "Settings" link for each main section.
2. Edit the HTML in the "Main Section Announcement" panel and in the "Default Subsection Announcement" panel to reflect the text you would like to appear in the left-column of all pages in that section.
3. Save the settings.
4. Repeat for all sections of the site.

Adding Main Sections

You can use the Section Editor to add a new main section of the site. To do this, click the "New Main Section" link in the Section Editor's main menu. All of the page templates are exactly the same for each section, so you can borrow the section templates of any of the other sections to create your new section.

Creating New Navigation Graphics

If you would like your new main section to appear in the graphical navigation bar at the top of this skin's pages, you should create a new navigation graphic for the new section.

To match the navigation graphics that come with this skin, the graphic should be 20 pixels high, with a background color of #000066 for the navigation graphic and #0066CC for the rollover graphic. The text should be white in 14-point "Abadi Condensed Extra Bold."

If you do not already have it, you may purchase Abadi Condensed Extra Bold here.

Adding or Removing subsections

You may add or remove subsections from any main section by using Big Medium's Section Editor.

When adding a new subsection to a main section, you typically do not need to load any navigation graphics or custom templates for that subsection.

Editing the Design Templates

If you would like to make any changes to the design templates for sites created with the "Serious News" skin, please note that these templates are written in XHTML, not HTML. The differences are relatively small, and if you are new to XHTML but familiar with HTML, it is not a difficult change. Visit Global Moxie's list of intros and tutorials to get started learning about XHTML.

Also, most of the layout of this skin is handled by cascading style sheets instead of HTML tables. This results in smaller file sizes and improved accessibility to non-PC internet devices like Palm PDAs and browsers used by the visually impaired. As a result, if you are interested in changing the basic layout of this skin, you can edit the site's style sheets using Big Medium's Style Editor. Visit Global Moxie's list of intros and tutorials for tips on getting started with cascading style sheets.