In a previous article, we showed you how to build a food website using the excellent built in features, plus additional plugins, available to you when using the MH Magazine theme. Today, we'll show you how to use the MH Magazine theme to build an engaging, fast, and easy to use news website.
Whether you're a start-up news blogger, a local news agency, or a national news organization, MH Magazine, with the addition of a small number of excellent WordPress plugins, is the perfect solution to ensure your readers get the news they want, when they want it, in a format that works for them.
What features make for an excellent news website?
Below is a collection of features most news websites need. With a combination of MH Magazine's built in features and additional WordPress plugins, your news website can proudly house all these features with barely any up-front effort from you – of course appart from publishing your actual content. So let's have a look at these features and plugins to create a professional news website.
News readers love to read on the go. Whether they're travelling by subway, on a bus, or in a cab, more people than ever commute by public transport and love to catch up on news or the latest headlines at the same time. That's no problem for you though, because when you use MH Magazine, your news website works out of the box on modern smartphone and tablet devices, ensuring your WordPress website readers can catch up on news wherever they are, whenever they would like.
MH Magazine offers several widget areas that you can use to display advertisements. This also ensures that you can start to monetize your news website straight away. Thanks to the thought-out placed widget areas across the theme, you can place advertisements across your entire WordPress website. You find the advertisers and we'll ensure it's easy for you to drop their adverts in to prominent positions around your website, without affecting the user experience for your readers.
With so much news to cram into a day, and so little retail space to work with, there is one method of delivery that has stood the test of time since the dawn of news websites. The news ticker, a scrolling set of text with the latest news headlines, has proven itself to be as popular by news website readers as it is with news website owners. MH Magazine comes with a jQuery News Ticker out of the box.
The internet provides global access to international news, so translating your website into other languages often becomes vital to reaching a wider audience. As standard, MH Magazine is translation ready, and also supports languages written in a right-to-left direction (RTL support). So you can simply translate your WordPress theme into any language which is also supported by WordPress.
A business model that relies on page views in order to attract advertisers (and therefore income for you) means you must find ways to entice readers to stay on your website and read more than just the initial article they were looking for. You must cross-sell your readers on to other articles of interest.
With MH Magazine, a Related Articles feature based on tags is already built in. This allows you to offer relevant articles once the visitor has finished reading their first article, giving them killer headlines and imagery at exactly the right time to ensure they become hooked by your content.
Reader engagement is a key tool in your efforts to build a lasting relationship, ensuring readers return time and time again. Any good and professional news organization knows that the results of a well crafted poll often provide the basis for an excellent news article.
YOP Poll – Our favourite polling WordPress plugin, tested and proved to work flawlessly with MH Magazine, is YOP Poll. This excellent and comprehensive WordPress plugin is full of useful features. Anything but minimalist, but still very simple to use. YOP Poll gives you the ability to show polls inside articles, as a widget in your MH Magazine sidebar, or both.
With this WordPress plugin you can run multiple polls at once, schedule polls, and control voting conditions so only registered users or guests can vote. The list of features in this free plugin is endless, it has 20,000+ active installs as well as an almost perfect 5/5 user rating on WordPress.org.
As you build relationships with your website readers, quite often their favorite news website becomes their go to website for other related content too. Weather, of course, tends to fall hand in hand with news, and as a result most successful news websites become a source of weather forecasting too. It's the perfect way to ensure your website visitors can find all the information they need on one website to successfully start their day.
Awesome Weather Widget is a WordPress plugin for displaying the weather that does as it says. It provides a simple, clean, beautifully designed weather widget, allowing you to show the local weather without the bloat of larger and more complex WordPress plugins. While simple, this plugin is still customizable, allowing you to amend the layout and colors to perfectly suit your brand.
When you're running a busy news website, potentially with multiple reporters and editors, it's important to have an editorial plan. There are many excellent plugins for WordPress to help you organize this plan inside WordPress itself, ensuring your website becomes an end-to-end portal for you and your team to refer to throughout your working day.
EditFlow – As one of the most popular editorial planning plugins for WordPress with 10,000+ active installs, it allows you to set up an editorial calendar, comment internally to allow you and your team to communicate, receive updates regarding the articles and jobs you're following, create custom status updates such as In Progress or Requires Editing, as well as many more features.
MH Magazine can adapt to many different website niches and it lends itself perfectly to being a news website. Use an editorial planning WordPress plugin, combined with our built in news ticker, advertisement slots and related articles, and with very little effort at all you can have your own custom news website, allowing your readers to keep up to date from any device, anywhere.