Apple Digital Magazine Newsstand
The digital magazine newsstand from Apple(TM) in iOS 5 provides the proper app based usability to iPod, iPhone, and iPad mobile and tablet devices. The newsstand app brings publication subscription functions to a managed newspaper and magazine applications shelf allowing for convenient access & visibility to the most recent publication issues.

Open Digital Publication Newsstands
Digital magazine distribution will grow quickly during the next 4 years and by 2015 all modern magazines will need to have a position in the digital magazine newsstands applicable for the major mobile and tablet reader devices. We expect to see continued value from cross platform magazine app development tools and magazine design solutions. And just as digital magazine software providers begin to promote digital newsstand issue updates as value added services, we will see traditional magazine fulfillment vendors recognize this digital newsstand as a market space where they are well suited to augment their print services.

Digital newsstands will provide opportunities for accelerated fulfillment and new value to readers and advertisers.   Publishers can track magazine ad performance and readership interaction with the latest news, content, or community at the magazine publication website.

And now, even traditional magazine newsstand locations have begun to focus on promoting their tablet magazine edition newsstands.

We hope to see open digital magazine newsstands flourish where shelf space is not limited to the largest magazine titles.

Magazine Website Design Considerations

For publishers evaluating mobile and digital magazine publishing options it’s also important to consider how the multiple magazine formats will be presented from the magazine’s brand hub -the magazine website. Magazine publishers can begin their magazine website redesign projects with consideration for how additional emedia and brand extension elements will dramatically evolve over the next few years.

For most magazine web designs, we seek to utilize the 960px grid system width to optimize the magazine website presentation for iPad and other mobile and tablet devices. This general portrait magazine website design also allows for a controlled and highly optimized homepage presentation to support brand aspects of the print magazine design.

The overall publishing business model will drive how publishers position and promote their mobile and digital brand extension elements from the magazine website. Premium and paid content elements (or apps) drive direct incremental publishing revenue but circulation and audience development digital strategies appear to build longer term integrated media advertising revenue capabilities.

We view the website as the magazine brand core for most consumer and B2B titles, even if the majority of revenue is still derived from print magazine revenue today. Increasingly the magazine audience and other visitor profile groups seek value and entertainment from their visit to the magazine publication website. Delivering a website user experience that provides a unique brand style impression and delivers value should be paramount to the revenue projection of a micro conversion (or paid content) strategy. There’s value in website visitors even if they aren’t print magazine subscribers yet.

Organizing relevant brand extension communication channels to the core magazine niche audience from the website will give your visitor the option to connect on their terms. Allowing these readers to choose how they interact with the magazine, via enewsletter, social media, website, digital edition, magazine apps, and yes, even the print magazine edition will enable the publisher to develop the magazine digital audience on engagement terms appropriate to the specific user choice and their personal technology adoption phase.

Modern Magazine Digital Publishing Tools
Here are some examples of digital magazine design tools and the modern magazine editions that are now changing they way readers receive their magazine issue.

WoodWing Tablet Publishing for iPad and Android

Adobe Digital Publishing Magazine Workflow

As we watch these and other innovative digital magazine design tools develop for the magazine publishing industry, we encourage publishers to also consider the magazine website design strategy that will be the online foundation for presenting these digital editions. We design the magazine publication website to be memorable & valuable, and position the new brand extension revenue generating elements as the next step for the visitors that have achieved this trust and value from the magazine website visit experience.

Here’s the News+ newspaper tablet concept by Bonnier.

The new tablet editions are built upon the Adobe Digital Publishing Suite. More

Adobe’s new digital magazine workflow is destined to change the way we design magazines forever. With rich multimedia, and pages based magazine interactivity, the new digital magazine design process will set the bar for all publishers that wish to cross the digital chasm and play in the new world of tablet magazine editions.

Magazine publishers will begin to see dozens and then hundreds of other iPad or tablet magazines and realize that they too must invest in the people, software, and workflows to grow their digital magazine brand. The growth will mimick the rise of digital magazine editions which is now a brand extension (perhaps on multiple platfoms) for most publishers. The rapid digital magazine growth accelerated just 3 years ago with publishers using one of a dozen core digital platform service providers and also a few in-house digital magazine builds.

These digital magazine providers might just rise again to provide better design widgets and cloud based tablet magazine edition production tools. If it’s just as easy to add multimedia and interactivity to an existing print layout magazine once produced for core digital edition (print clone) distribution, publishers might just skip the software based multimedia workflows.

Either way, the rise of the tablet magazine as a required element of any magazine brand is rapidly approaching. The advantage of being first is publicity. The advantage of waiting until your publication’s competitors have produced their tablet editions is cost and strategy. Think first of creating value for your niche and let that guide your move into the tablet edition magazine brand space.

Updated: How MSL Leverages their print magazine in the tablet magazine edition

Magazine Web Content Administration
A key advantage of the CMS is the ability to easily train the magazine publisher’s staff.  All content is entered via an administrative portal with separate website theme.

The magazine publisher or web content manager oversees several key publishing aspects from the website administration login:

Content - Content is organized by parent “Sections” and child “Categories” for all key elements of the magazine publisher’s web based taxonomy.

Menus - Menus control the magazine’s main navigation and sub navigation.   The subscriber or reader guest will access all content based on the layout and organization of the menu structure to categories, pages, or website functionality components.

Components - Beyond the core Joomla CMS software are the “Extensions” that have been developed by the open source community. Extensions are add-ons that typically perform feature extension to the core CMS publishing platform.   A shopping cart or calendar system would be examples of the types of software tools that can easily be added to the core CMS.

Modules - Modules are regions which can be set to appear across all types of similar pages based on where a visitor has navigated in the website.   Modules can hold zones for magazine advertising, and many other features or feeds that augment the core content view.

Magazine Website Design
Magazine web design for open source software CMS based products typically involves a templating structure.  The advantage for magazine publishers is that their publication website can grow quickly since new articles and content are dynamically assigned website theme or style elements automatically.

Magazine Website Features
While magazine web features can be added (typically as component add-ons) to a Joomla based publication website, the flexibility and uniformity of these items is a weakness for Joomla.

Upgrades and Maintenance
Inline updates occur on an ongoing basis. Joomla is now in a 1.5 series, making major advancements from prior 1.0 version architecture.   Any software solutions vendor will advise the importance of making sure that the proper updates and security issues are properly managed.

Upgrade Path for Magazines
As with any CMS for a magazine, there are upgrade options to more powerful publishing platforms.  The very fact that the publisher has already created a database drive website means that data may be migrated to another CMS. Magazine publishers that have greater needs for custom website functionality and features will often look at Drupal CMS as an upgrade path from Joomla.

Project Site: Joomla.org
Written in PHP with MySQL Database
Deployment for Magazine Web Design: Under 30 days
Deployment for Magazine Configuration: Under 30 days
Release: Joomla 1.5.19 Wojmamni ama batani – security release

We have several active clients that have utilized Joomla for over 3 years for their magazine websites.  Magazine publishers should expect to have a magazine website re-design performed annually based on competitive titles.  Magazine social media elements have also been motivating factors for new magazine designs performed in the past year.  Light website configuration is required during the ongoing publication web re-designs.

These magazine publisher CMS solutions have many magazine publisher specific configurations capabilities for optimized publisher periodic content presentation and readership interaction capabilities.

WordPress Magazine CMS

WordPress as a Magazine CMS – Using wordpress for a magazine website provides a low cost and quick setup option. The design can visually rival any modern magazine website but has much fewer customizations and capabilities for meeting typical web based magazine revenue objectives.

Joomla Magazine CMS

Joomla as a Magazine CMS – Joomla magazine websites are a comfortable medium between the simplicity of WordPress and the extreme capabilities available in the Drupal based magazine CMS. Joomla is excellent for publishers with multiple staff members who will interact with the publication website content and can handle most of the readership and advertising functions required to balance out the publisher emedia offerings.

Drupal Magazine CMS

June 2010 Chart: Overall Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and TYPO3 Trend by Google Trends.

Updated Jan 2011 Chart: Overall Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and TYPO3 Trend by Google Trends.

 

Updated Aug 2011 Chart: Overall Drupal, WordPress, Joomla, and TYPO3 Trend by Google Trends.

While OS magazine CMS software is trending up, many large publishers still seek commercial magazine website solutions based on more advanced publishing workflows and scalability needs. Commercial web CMS magazine solutions provide necessary integration capabilities and flexibility to meet the specific magazine publishing circulation, commerce, and editorial content workflows. Here are some magazine publishing CMS solutions:

ePublishing
Powerful, yet simple-to-use web 2.0-enabled tools manage the creation, publishing and optimization of content, data and eCommerce. A hosted solution, it is the power behind many industry-leading publishers. source ePublishing.com

Oxcyon
Oxcyon’s Centralpoint’s unique CMS Lifecycle Management Solutions provide Publishers with a comprehensive approach to building new subscribers, fulfillment, digital rights, and lead tracking managing the complete information value chain from collaborative creation of content, to management, and to personalized targeted delivery. source Oxcyon.com

Crown Peak
CrownPeak’s Web site management solutions allow the publisher to quickly establish the publishing platform they need, without buying the infrastructure that gets in the way of a successful business. source CrownPeak.com

Nstein
Nstein supports some of the largest media organizations from content creation right through to delivery and distribution, operating under the philosophy that for content to have value, it must be connected with people. source: Nstein.com

Clickability
Clickability’s Platform-as-a-Service gives publishers of all sizes the tools they need to flourish online, without becoming IT professionals. Most users can master the platform in a day or two. Most companies quickly see a 100% increase in site traffic, hand in hand with a 50%-90% reduction in Web publishing costs. source clickability.com

Commercial publishing solutions and general publishing solution providers are also focusing on Saas (Software as a service) or Cloud (operations that take place within the network infrastructure) based solutions to help lower adoption and overall maintenance costs.

As magazine publishing CMS consultants, we evaluate the publisher’s overall web and digital magazine requirements to insure the proper magazine tool is utilized. Taking the time to define the critical emedia elements to be facilitate your publication website will insure ad sales, editorial, and production publishing objectives are achieved.

Time already has a Free magazine issues newsstand library app (similar to the Zinio newsstand and magazine reader app) allowing iPad users to contain their issues in a single updating magazine app container.

“73,000 purchases of Wired iPad app in first nine days. Should beat newsstand sales of print mag (ave. mid 80s) this month.” – Chris Anderson

It’s not just the pricing model that excites us, it’s the fact that people who have tried the initial iPad magazines really like the experience not to mention the portability. It’s clear to me that this is the future of optimized magazine circulation and the proper magazine publisher app development tools are what need our attention right now.

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Blog video: http://www.pagegangster.com/mobile-devices/

We are still in beta and version 1 territory, but it’s exciting to see what the innovative digital magazine vendors have created to leverage tablet technology.  This all within one month of the iPad release. Six months after the Kindle release we were still trying to get proper data formatting specifications for how to accommodate periodic data on the greyscale devices. A world of difference! I look forward to posting updates with more advances on the colorful and bright future of tablet magazines for publishers. I’m confident the pace will rapidly increase on new features and announcements from many vendors.

The latest Popular Science iPad Edition has plenty of ads along with an intuitive scrolling content layer above the core editorial and ad focus images.  The experience of moving through the paginated interactive media in this format is a close match to that of reading a real print magazine.  It blows away the 16 shades of grey that limited our vision and creativity as the ebook was initially defined.

Make every iPad magazine edition a story.  Get your advertisers involved in the story and encourage the advertisers to invest in their creative process to tie their ads into the issue theme.

These few initial iPad Editions have exceeded my expectations for editorial and advertising brand impression results that will benefit those magazine publishers that harness this power.  Expect circulation audit to change quickly as the new digital tablet reader produces the opportunity for both reader engagement and advertising results that have never been possible previously.