A Plan for Creating an Online Magazine

When talking about putting magazines on the web, I like to think of a web where current magazines or "e-zines" or whatever they've been called in the past, never happened. A lot of these things that have been done so far were the result of the following Plans:

1. Using a website to drive print sales
2. Using a website instead of print
3. Not really having a plan

I would like to be of the opinion that Plan A has been most prevalent in the current state of the web, but that simply isn’t true. Even Plan B, where someone has decided that a print mag is just too much bother, and started a website instead that's not a magazine on the web, that's just a website with no real plan. So we take a hard look at Plan C. I'm not sure if anyone ever plans to make a plan, but when nobody else seems to have a plan, why should I make a plan?

Confused? You should be. This is the state of magazines on the web right now: confusion.

Content producers are confused, distributors are confused, and worst of all, readers are confused. Actually, it's probably worse than that. You see, a lot of readers actually want good magazine content on the web. They don't want to be confused with crappy navigation, useless paging and petty SEO tactics, invasive ads, and hapless integration with social networks. Readers want the same amount of thought to go into the design of a magazine on the web as went into a magazine when it was in print.

It's mind boggling to me that readers aren't being given that, and that's the problem I wanted to see solved when I heard that my colleague Andre Gaulin was taking on the design of our magazine solution. He'd already worked with a few companies that had taken their magazines to the web as custom jobs, and he wanted to be able to give that knowledge he garnered as a reusable package.

You see, magazines have the potential to become the "darling" of the web, the kind of destination that will make readers feel good, just like holding a real print magazine ought to feel. A lot of the content on the web has been obscured behind poor design and semi-evil tactics that simply don't give readers what they desire: a fulfilling experience.

A good design and well thought-out, simple plan can turn this around. Think of it from the viewpoint of a writer. When putting together an article, say a couple thousand words, with some photography, it's easy to imagine how a good editor is going to compile that into a digestible story that does justice to it's content. Well, on the web, that doesn't need to get lost, it just needs to get addressed as a design principle and not as an afterthought.

With what I've seen from Andre and our team, our Magazine offering can help content editors do on the web what they've been doing in print for years, without having to compromise because of the medium that the web has become. Do that, and readers will flock to this content as a first-class destination in itself. That's right - the web can become the primary destination for magazine content. If you've ever wondered how to get advertisers interested, really interested, in your content, make it live and breathe on the web in the same way that it does in print. It's a heck of a good start on the pathway toward great growth for your readership.