Birmingham Post are getting a new site, I’m not even going to link to their current trash. Here’s my responce of of Joanna Geary’s blog. If you’d like to see a decent site, give her your thoughts. BiNS has some great ideas, if they only achieved a handfull of these suggestions the site would be awsome.

Just to be clear, I don’t read the Post at all at the moment. That’s simply because I can’t get it on the web. I normally buy a guardian a few times a week, and read anything I miss on their site. So I’d happily start taking an interest in local news if you have a decent site.

Starting with some nice clean modern web standards, proper HTML + CSS, if your going to be pumping a table based inaccessible design then don’t bother. You have to make sure the tools your using to publish stories support web standards as well. At each stage during the process you should make a point of asking about standards, accessibility and browser support. If your web team is telling your that it’ll be ‘Internet Explorer only’ then you’ve got problems. Plenty of nice URLs, seriously I want to go to /edgbaston and get my local news, RSS for everything. I want to be able to access the site on an iPhone or on a Wii. It might not look exactly the same, but it’ll be usable. If you’ve a good web team then this isn’t going to be a problem, they should know all about WordPress. If you can’t get it right, you’ll be laughed out of town.

Interaction with the local blogging/flickr community, there’s more of us and we know lots of stuff that you don’t, if you do nice things like linking to our stories and give proper credits for photos you use then were more likely to send you stuff.

Video is nice, but unless your employing people to film, edit it and share it properly it won’t be worth it. e.g. I’d happily watch good quality video, properly edited and I’d like to embed your video on my site, I want to see you put it on YouTube, I want a weekly video podcast of all of the stories you’ve published.

These things are not complicated/beyond the realms of possibility even for a medium sized paper, you just have to have passionate people who enjoy this stuff and want to make a really good site.