Korea IT Times Blog

Well the magazine edition is pretty much done for this month, so its back to working on the web site.  In order of priority, here are the objectives I’ve got for www.koreaittimes.com:

1.  Reorganize the front page links – There are three rows of channel links on the front page, which really pushes down the content too far.  On my 1024×768 screen it takes up way too much real estate, I hate to think what it looks like at 800×600.  I think there are about 30 channels up there now.  I have to do something about that.

2.  Online advertising – Since our web site is up and running, its time to set up online advertising.  My boss and the Mr. Kim, the advertising guy, are both very interested in seeing what we can do with this online space in the money-making department.  This is actually related to the front page links because with such a large header on the web site, where can we put ads?  Some reorganization might be in order.  I’d like to put Google Ads near the bottom of the articles, actually, next to the comment section. I think they would catch the most attention there.  I’ve looked into displaying ads on a Drupal site, and there seems to be a lot of OpenX integration. I’ll have to look into that after I get the links sorted out.

3.  Put up previous issues - This is turning into a more difficult assignment than I first thought.  While I do have the database of the old site, and I have managed to install and successfully use Node_Import to import a CSV file containing all the past web site data, two things continue to elude me.  First, the ProsePoint customizations put the subhead and the published date in a different kind of field, so I am unable to import them.  That gives me 2,900 articles all published on the day I did the import with no subheadlines, which is not an easy spot to work from.  I’m going to have to work very closely with the ProsePoint developer to see about getting this done.

 4.  Register with google news, reuters, etc etc. - After some consideration I think I’d better hold off on trying to register our web site as a legitimate news source until after we have our archives up.  That makes us look a little more respectable.  And, of course, before registering with Google I’m going to have to set up a News Sitemap.  I think it’s possible with the XML Sitemap module for Drupal, however that is still in development so I would have to do some tweaking on my own I think.