Yes, folks, I have taken a bit of a side trip on documenting the birth of Kelley’s WordPress site; but the resulting product was well worth it, as you will see.

While building Kelley’s site, she directed me to SHIFT Communication’s Social Media Newsroom (SMNR) template, saying “Hey, wouldn’t it be great if we had one of these?”

Of course, I agreed. Not only did I see the potential benefits of such a site to my present clients, as well as to my own publishing company and authors, but I could foresee the tremendous contribution Todd Defren’s template will inevitably make to the Web 2.0/social media movement.

So I poured over SHIFT’s SMNR presentation and dove in…

The biggest challenge for me was not (necessarily) getting all of the elements on the site, rather, doing it in a way that would make it easy for the end-user to maintain once it was set up. Because, as most of you know, it is my intention to ultimately “empower” people to that end. Therefore, much of the pre-thought for the site was in figuring out how a user would add their latest press release link, media coverage entry, multimedia elements, updated team information, etc. There is still much streamlining to do in regards to that, but a firm enough foundation is in place, so that training an end-user should be pretty painless.

The first thing I did was find a few WordPress themes that I thought would work well as a base for the site. Todd’s choice of Mollio was a good one, but not for the softer look I wanted Kelley’s to have. My final candidates were 3-column themes that did not use images or a lot of color. It makes sense to me that these SMNRs should not be bogged down with anything other than what the media will find useful to them, so a good, clean, image-free theme seemed the best choice. I did, however, want to be sure to incorporate Kelley’s colors and logo into the look of the newsroom, so that it would still be somewhat seamless from her main site. I eventually chose GPS Fluid.

This theme came with two “widgetized” sidebars, but I chose to only use the right sidebar for widgets, and customize the left sidebar the way Todd did - with scrollable content boxes for the team information and multimedia gallery. I will go into more detail on how to create those types of content boxes using categories later (the same concept applies to the content boxes in the body area as well).

I used the following widgets/plugins to aid in the creation of the newsroom: Category Cloud Widget, IM Online, My Technorati Tag Cloud (this one is not on the site yet, but will be soon), Share This, Simple WordPress Contact Form. I also got a lot of help, as usual, from the WordPress forums.

Once the newsroom was mostly functional, I had Kelley create her purpose-built del.icio.us page, co.mments account, claim the blog in Technorati, and decide on some content to populate the sections.

One way her newsroom will differ from others is that (since she is a publicist) her media coverage, news release, and multimedia sections will also include her client’s coverage. So you will see that we populated the site with her most recent project - the book How Best to Avoid Dying by Owen Egerton. This may be something we re-think later (by adding content boxes); but for now (at least for her smaller clients) this should work well. She will likely encourage her larger clients to incorporate their own social media newsrooms.

I have a lot more to contribute to, and say about, the development of this newsroom; but for now, I just want to get it out there for people to poke around on. I would really appreciate any feedback or bug reports. It is by no means finished; but enough, I hope, to spark some conversation.

Here is the direct link: http://www.kelleyburrus.com/newsroom, and a link to Kelly’s site (http://www.kelleyburrus.com/) that will bring you there as well.

Thanks for stopping by! And, thank you, Todd, for a great contribution!