A news aggregation site is great way to bring content from all over the internet and assemble it in one place. They can help us sift through things and keep up to date on specific subjects. Today we are going to learn how to simply and easily make our own using WordPress.
What to consider?
There are a few popular ways to use content aggregation.
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Content Curation
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Marketing
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Up to The Minute News
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Industry Specific News
How to stand out.
A great way to make your news aggregation site pop out is to efficiently use categories to organize things. Making it easier for readers to find topics quickly is a great way to keep your readership coming back. People don’t like to search for things and with a little bit of planning you can really improve customer experience. To accomplish this we will want to chose a theme for WordPress that will really fit our needs. There are a lot of news related themes to chose from. You should chose one that makes it easy to see a lot of articles at once but you must remember to try and keep things organized or your readers will suffer.
Lastly, don’t forget to include attribution for the articles you show. Plagiarism isn’t a great way to start a new webpage and its easily avoided by simply letting readers know where an article comes from. Being able to follow an article back to its source is very important for some readers and its easy to make everyone happy by just always making sure to add attribution.
Lets get started
If you don’t already have a particularly good, high quality hosting provider then make sure to get one. Check out companies like ASPnix that provide higher speeds for their clients but don’t charge too much to get your foot in the door. You need to find a hosting provider that will give you fast loading times or you will have issues right out of the gate. Because of the nature of this type of site, you will be constantly importing from RSS feeds in the background. You really need a dependable and fast hosting provider for this to work well. If not your site will be slow or unresponsive and your readership will suffer for it.
Install WordPress
Follow the link below for a really simple tutorial on installing WordPress. The instructions demonstrate how to complete a 1 click installation in about a minute. If you already understand how to install WordPress then just skip straight to the next step.
Pick a Theme
WordPress provides access to tons of free themes. A quick search for suitable options on the official WordPress repository presented me with almost 300 themes for displaying news content. If one of those isn’t to your liking there are untold thousands of other options out there on the internet for you to purchase for a bit of money. Pick one that looks like how you want to represent yourself but remember to make sure that whatever you chose can display a lot of articles on your homepage efficiently. As I said before your theme must allow for categories in order to organize your articles nicely.
Pick an RSS aggregator plugin
You have a web host, you have installed WordPress, chosen a theme, and now you need a plugin to help automate your new site. The type of plugin we are talking about is intended to automate the process of populating your page with fresh up to the minute content. Any news site is going to have an RSS feed. RSS stands for “Really Simple Syndication”. The RSS feeds that we selectively choose will be where the plugin will automatically pull content from. Afterwards, much of your site will effectively run on autopilot.
Below are 6 of the most popular examples of this type of aggregation plugin:
I hope that was helpful. If you have any questions or comments feel free to say something below.
