Roxanne Gasana, deputy news editor

As the Campus Carrier shifts away from a print edition, Berry College Student Media is entering a new era with the launch of a revamped website that combines the Carrier and Viking Fusion under one platform. 

The website is intended to act as a common platform between the two student media sources while still preserving the identity of each of them. This redesigning of the website was done due to a change within Berry’s student media sources, specifically with the transition of the Carrier to be a digital publication.

“The overall need for the new website came about because the Carrier was moving away from a print edition and was going all digital except for a few special occasions,” Steven Hames, director of student media, said.

Will Meadows, the studio assistant coordinator of Viking Fusion, was one of the people who planned and developed the website and said the transition brought an important question to light.

“One of the big implications of the Carrier going digital is where are people going to access it and get to it?” Meadows said. “I think that was the biggest motivation for a redesign for the website.” 

The transition was brought about when there was a need to define the different student media roles.

Meadows explained that the leading members of the Carrier and Viking Fusion at this point began thinking about how the transition to digital would impact the audience of the Carrier as well as the Viking
Fusion website.

“I got brought in as the current Executive Director of  Fusion, and Carson Bonner was  brought in as the editor-in-chief at that time. We would meet with Steven Hames, [Curt] Hersey and Kevin Kleine and go over initial thoughts and ideas, as well as looking at templates and messing around with the framework of the website,” Meadows said.

Since content for the Carrier was already available on Viking Fusion’s website, merging both medias was a logical step to meet the requirements of the newspaper in the new format. Instead of developing a new website for the Carrier, the decision was made to create a new overarching website for Berry College Student Media. It did not mean that the two websites should look identical or similar in other ways. The idea was to let the two organizations keep their individuality despite using the same platform.

Hames said maintaining the Carrier’s branding was particularly important as the newspaper changed formats.

“We did not want to do away with the branding of the Campus Carrier,” Hames said. “We wanted to keep that alive.”

The design transforms the way people access Berry College’s student media content. Before, the Viking Fusion site was merely a collection of recent updates. People would have access to whatever was posted most recently, which could have been an article, podcast, social media post or other student media piece.

“The biggest difference that I’ve seen so far is the landing page,” Meadows said.

Rather than simply giving the visitor the latest article, the homepage now serves as a way into either Viking Fusion or the Carrier. The viewer has the choice to pick which publication they would like to visit.

“It acts as more of a host site to encompass Berry media rather than just the publications themselves,” Meadows said. “It brings a little bit more unity to them.”

This also tackles a problem that Hames found on the old site. With information from both medias appearing together, viewers were not sure which of the organizations produced which article. For example, it was hard to tell the Carrier’s news articles from Fusion’s
news articles.

“At times there was confusion with the past website of what was Carrier content and what was Fusion content,” Hames said.

While attempting to emphasize these differences, the new site allows for the publications to coexist. At the top of the homepage, each publication’s logo is displayed, and under the logos is a sections tab where each media’s work can be found.

The other area where the site changed was navigation. Previously, the site focused more on posts, while now there are lots of menus and subpages on which content can be divided by categories such as news, sports, arts & living, entertainment and archives. In addition, there are links to Valkyrie, the lifestyle magazine, and Ramifications, the literary magazine,  at the bottom of the homepage. 

Prior to these changes, there was one news section that combined both the Carrier and Fusion’s work, but with the redesign, their work is separated for ease of access. The final design uses the landing page to display the two publications on one website, while sections of the page direct viewers toward publication-specific content. 

The new website was designed with the aim of being accessible to viewers who might use content in ways different from others. Some of these efforts include providing text for photographs and images, as well as captions and transcriptions for multimedia content.

The team wanted viewers to be able to find content without having to work their way through a complicated website. On the other hand, it was important that this redesign reflected Berry student media yet kept the unique identities of both the Carrier and Viking Fusion.

“The biggest challenge was picking a design that represented both publications while keeping the functionality and simplicity of the website,” Meadows said. “We spent a lot of time working on looking for templates and color palettes and figuring out what’s the most user-friendly but also represents Berry media and keeps the personality of each publication individually.”

In addition to the creation process, there were a lot of tests conducted throughout
the redesign. 

“When we were doing the demos for it, we were just working with old articles.” Meadows said.

The team conducted testing as they had to take into account the compatibility of the website with different content types. A design that is effective with a particular photo or article might become less efficient when other headlines or multimedia pieces are used. 

Similarly, Hames faced the problem of implementing this redesign from the technical perspective. After choosing the theme, the team needed to adjust it to the needs of student media organizations. 

According to Hames, the team spent some time figuring out how to navigate the menus and how the viewers will find their way through different kinds of content. 

“We had to do a lot of menus and a lot of subpages because the old website didn’t have a lot of pages,” he said.

For Meadows, the most exciting part of the project is seeing the site move from a work in progress into an active platform.

“I’m excited to look at initial reactions and see what the website looks like,” Meadows said.

Hames emphasized that the move to digital does not mean the publication itself has disappeared. “The Carrier has not gone away,” Hames said. “It’s still here. It’s still part of Berry. It’s just in a new form. It’s just in a new way.”