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.

Our magazine website redesign for existing publications is focused on leveraging print magazine strength for multiple digital brand extension elements.  The magazine web redesign should occur annually at a minimum as the publisher’s technical audience and advertisers will notice older design standards and usability.  With both the publisher core business strategy and a “redesign for revenue” philosophy we seek to create a website design that can be properly maintained for readership value and one that offers advertisers multiple options to interest and engage the right audience for their products and services.
 

View Live Site: Holistic Health Magazine

Group publishers with both industry and consumer audience segments that span multi-publication brands and channels require both a web design and user experience that can differentiate the title in a group as well as elevate the magazine’s website above other online destinations within the brand niche.  As the number of group publisher brand extensions grow, so too does the need for simple and clear usability for new and return audience personas to the website portal.

Website information architecture for city, state, and regional guide magazine web designs seeks to provide utility to the target audience for which the publication to focused as well as the vendor group participating in each guide.  The proper website architecture and interactive design can provide value to magazine advertisers with direct display ad programs to multi-channel lead generation tools.  Publication directories and multimedia allow the publication advertisers to travel beyond the typical yellow pages experience as they qualify leads and website referrals.

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.