How to create a news website

Creating a news website is not an easy task, as you have to load tons of information to your website, and more over, you need to make all info sections attract visitors' attention. Today it's hard to catch up with all the information which floods the mass media. How to win through such amount of competitors and deliver content to your visitors? Never-ending news flow should be reflected on your website as well as possible. It's very important to bring all kinds of info representation into play – some people have better visual memory, others prefer listening rather than reading or watching. So try to integrate text, photos, videos and podcasts in your news website the way to reach the necessary effect and draw traffic to your site.

As always Site2You is ready to help and today we will consider some basics of creating a news website within our site builder. You will see that it's quite easy to transform a business style e-turnkey to a news resource.

So here we go and for the start we chose a corporate web turnkey you can see below: 

1. First, let's inform search engines that a new website displaying world news and events is created. We can do this by setting meta tags for the home page. Go to “Edit Page Layout” and click on “Page Properties” button. Here you can do all necessary changes concerning home page properties. We've edited HTML title: 

2. Next step is main page appearance editing. We have to give our website a proper name and configure a menu bar. To change site's logo, switch to “Edit Content” tab and click on “Edit highlighted content” right near the logo area. The same way you can change the slogan. We found it reasonable to turn slogan into the date.

To edit menu items, click on “Edit highlighted content” in the menu area. In the opened window you can create a new menu item, change item's properties, or simply move it to the necessary position. 

Here is our new main page header:

3. After our news website got its new title and header, it's time to fill it with some news! In this area you can display all your imagination and knowledge. In our case the upper right side of the site's body will be occupied by breaking news video. To embed a video, switch to the “Edit Page Layout” tab and hover the cursor over “Add content box” button. In the drop-down choose Photo&Video => Google/Yahoo/YouTube Video. In the opened window choose a way of inserting your video and set the rest of details. All video servers usually provide video source code details, just copy the code and paste it into the appropriate field. 

To add video thumbnail, resize it or change the title, go to the “Edit content” tab and as usually, click on “Edit highlighted content” in the upper right corner of the video area.

You can add title and preview text to the featured video by transforming any text box available in the Site2You builder. Choose “Edit Page Layout” => “Add content box” => Page texts and choose “Page texts” item in the drop down. Select content box you want to be displayed by dragging it to the right column of the window (see the picture below)

To adapt the text to your needs, switch to “Edit content” mode and edit necessary content box.

4. Left column of our website main section will display the category “Top News Headlines”. We created it the way described above. Simply inserted “Featured Services” info box and edited it. 

Now the WIM.news website provides people with some hot news: 

5. Let's place a photo gallery to the lower left corner of the site's main section. Again, insert a particular content box and transform it to the photo showcase section. You can upload any photo by using “iBrowser' button right in the WYSIWYG area. 

6. Each website category should lead to some exact page. Let's link photo section placed on the home page to the page Photos. First of all, we have to create a new page: “Edit Page Layout” => “Add New Page”. As you know, our site builder is most intuitive, so it won't take much time for you to set up the “Photos” page. 

After adding some information boxes, we've got this: 

In this example we didn't set a menu button for this page. But in case you want to do this, follow next steps: “Edit Page Layout” => “Page Properties” => “Add A New Menu Button”. 

So how a visitor will get to the page “Photos” from the main page? That's easy! Go to the home page, switch to the “Edit content” mode, and press “Edit highlighted content” in the photo area. An image will be the link to the “Photos” page. Select the image, click “Insert link” button and paste the URL of the page “Photos”.

This way you can link any info section to the proper web page.

7. Last thing we will do around the main page of our news website is “More news” category. It can be done the same way as any other content box we've created before. The only difference is that this section is multi-column. This can be achieved by using “Insert a new table” button (see the picture below).

Simply create a table, type necessary text, insert links and voila: 

Finally we've got the new home page of the WIM.news website: 

Now you know the basics of new website creating and using Site2You website builder tools, you can easily build you own striking website which will become an effective news medium on the web.

Don't forget that you can contact your web master anytime and get not only solution of potential problem, but some additional features and options you may apply to your website as well.