The Miami Student is the student-run newspaper at Miami University. Fun fact: it is also the oldest college newspaper west of the Alleghenies. In addition to publishing a print edition every Tuesday and Friday, the Student has an online website, hosted on WordPress, where all the print articles are uploaded. But more recently, the students running the paper have faced multiple problems with this website and the server it’s hosted on. James Tobin, the adviser for the Student and professor of one of my journalism classes knew I was into web design and recruited me to fix the website’s problems.
Instead of trying to fix the site with the current theme, I decided to start from scratch with an entirely new theme. I worked on this behind the scenes during the fall semester. We also got off the University-hosted server that we had no control over to a server of our own. Then, over our winter break, I implemented the site I had designed. Although it was based on a current theme, I did many alterations in the coding of the site to get it to look like a news site. The design is based off of the print copy of the newspaper.
Immediately after going live with the site, I received a lot of positive feedback from not only current editors of the paper but also past editors. Throughout college, I continued to improve the site as the Student’s lead web developer. I also started developing a mobile application that allows students to easily read the paper from their mobile devices.
