By Sandra Chalmers: Editor-in-Chief
Photo Credit: Nick Ruiz
With the start of a new fresh semester, The Pride brings to its students a new online playground as we unveil the modern, revamped and exciting new website.
The Pride’s improved website, www.csusmpride.com, offers a new kind of interaction that connects students with happenings around campus and community. The latest news, features, sports, and arts and entertainment stories engage our readers to follow more current events that relate to campus life and around our county.
The simple, slick design allows for expanded content to be featured online as well as a variety of interactive elements bring our readers together by rating favorite stories, commenting on articles and voting on the weekly poll.
“Well the csusmpride.com is based on a WordPress layout, I just created a custom theme to make it look nice, but I could spend an hour going into it so I’ll just leave it at that,” said Nick Ruiz, the web designer for The Pride’s new website. A Web Design and Interactive Media major at the Art Institute of San Diego, Ruiz also has honorable mentions through his work in designing websites for Element Skateboards.
“A combination of programs came into play when I create any site, I used programs like Photoshop and Illustrator to create buttons and templates. I usually use Dreamweaver to code the site, but most of the work is done by hand where the code is written in,” continued Ruiz.
Another tool that the site now offers is an easy way to connect with The Pride on all our social networking media. Our Facebook and Twitter accounts can easily be reached, where users will find our daily updates and posts. Our social media sites keep our readers connected with the latest news and offer a student perspective on current events beyond the San Marcos city limits.
According to Ruiz, since the site is based on a WordPress template, the visual appeal of the site is easier to read and navigate, unlike other over cluttered and busy news sites.
“I ‘d say my favorite part of the site is the styled posts, the thumbnail photos and small excerpt taken from the post is a nice touch I think,” continued Ruiz. “I designed a custom layout in Photoshop that I could reference. Then, with the Photoshop template to work off of, I recreated the layout using HTML and CSS. Once set, I went back in and added WordPress functionality.”
“So, what we got is a blog that looks and works exactly how we want. The major benefit of this is creative control.”
The site sight will enable readers have access to exclusive web content and media that may not be featured in our printed edition. Other perks included subscribing to The Pride and receiving email notices of the new weekly issues.
The Pride invites students to join our team and contribute to our content, by covering student organization events, sport games, attending and reviewing local concerts, or even by providing artwork such as cartoons for an article. A variety of opportunities for all majors are offered by working with The Pride, students can build a portfolio and gain hands-on experience about newspaper productions and the media world.
Volunteer forms are available for download on our website. Submit completed forms to to Joan Anderson, the faculty advisor to The Pride, in Markstein Hall 259.
The Pride welcomes story idea submissions to our email account at [email protected].
Weekly meeting are held at The Pride office in Craven Hall 3500. Every Tuesday during U-hour, The Pride distributes 2,000 copies at 14 different locations across campus and is the only independent student run newspaper on the CSUSM campus.