Tips on converting a print magazine to an online publication

[CortexRock]

I work for a local government agency and I've been asked my bosses to look at converting our established print magazine for residents with a circulation of about 70,000 copies to a parallel 'online' format.

If anyone has experience of doing such a project, I'd appreciate some input.

Cheers in advance!

 

[Blue Velvet]

In what software is the print version produced? Many times, I've exported plain text and HTML from Quark or InDesign plus down-sampled images and passed that over to another team to clean up and sort out, although most of our print work goes out online as lo-res PDFs.

There's a big difference in the way that people read online and how they read print. Is the content of the magazine flexible enough to modify how its presented?

 

[CortexRock]

Thanks BV - artwork is produced in Quark 6.5, but the designers are very much print-orientated so I doubt they would know how to reliably do the necessary exports.

There's no precedent set for the online layout, so formatting etc is pretty much down to me, although I'd like to preserve the 'feel' of the print version.

At the moment we use low-res PDFs of the print version, but we have to move away from that as we're being told that PDFs are not a suitable accessible solution for content delivery. Local government web pages are some of the most strictly-regulated in the public sector, so I have a number of hurdles to deal with.

 

[angelneo]

I think preserving the look and feel of the print version is entirely up to you but you shouldn't let that prevents you from using features that an online version can provide. Simple stuff like hyperlinking from one article to another, or more interesting stuff like providing RSS feeds of the top headline articles, or even allowing users to have an online subscription to your magazine etc.
Just dumping everything on your magazine onto the web and leaving it there will not exactly entice people to look at your online version.

 

[rajfantastic]

i think a PDF would be the best way to preserve the design across all browsers/platforms. flash is another alternative, but it requires more development time. here are some great examples using both methods:

the royal magazine
candy

I think preserving the look and feel of the print version is entirely up to you but you shouldn't let that prevents you from using features that an online version can provide.

this seems to be more about a web site's features than a print design that needs to be repurposed.