A decade ago, creating a professional looking, fully interactive website was massively expensive. Today, publishers can take advantage of one of many free publishing software programs available to create a high-quality, low-cost homepage for their magazine. “The only cost is time,” said Issa Breibish, a founding partner at international design company Veer.

Milena Radzikowska and Issa Breibish.

Breibish, along with Milena Radzikowska, a design instructor at Mount Royal College, offered this advice and much more as part of their “Get Your Geek On: Internet DIY” presentation at the 12th annual Alberta Magazines Conference.

After outling the basics of what’s now widely known as Web 2.0 (participation, community and collaboration), Breibish and Radzikowska went on to explore and then dispelled four myths about the Web that hold magazine publishers back from giving Internet publishing a real go. In short, they argued: 

• The Web doesn’t spell the end of print, it spells evolution of print.
• You’re not too late in the game. A 2006 study by The Bivings Report analyzing the Web presence of the Top 50 U.S. magazines revealed that Web 2.0 features such as RSS, video and podcasts are not widely used yet—no single feature was used by more than 50% of the magazines surveyed.
• As reported above, Web publishing is not massively expensive.
• Highly technical skills such as coding and scripting are no longer required. With modern publishing platforms, producing your own online content is as easy typing into a Microsoft Word document.

Free/inexpensive Web publishing software programs:

• Blogger
• Movable type
• Wordpress
• Joomla!
• Pluck
• Ning
• Lulu

 Further reading:

• Get Your Geek On: Internet DIY full presentation [PDF]
• Beyond magazine blog post about the session
• The Presence of Magazines on the Internet [The Bivings Report study]