Newspapers are a crucial part of our day-to-day lives. Over the years, the majority of avid newspaper readers have slowly but surely opted for online newspaper platforms for their day-to-day news needs and information. 

And as the reader base grows, more and more traditional news outlets are going online to provide their information delivery services via newspaper websites. The current trend also reflects the current demand for newspaper website design and development work. 

WordPress development teams are hard at work creating functional and reliable newspaper themes. Using these themes, you are able to create stunning WordPress newspaper websites with functional newspaper layout.

The prestigious Pew Research Center dictates that the number of unique monthly visitors to the websites of newspapers in the year 2020 was in the range of well over 34 million. By launching a newspaper website now, you’ll have the ability to make a mark on the market for news and information services.

Benefits of Best Designed News Websites on WordPress?

Although there are multiple great website hosting and building platforms out right now. But most popular news and magazine page outlets have been opting for WordPress for the benefits this amazing CMS platform comes with. 

The following are the listed benefits of using WordPress CMS for newspaper sites: 

No Coding Requirement: WordPress CMS is great for beginners and novice users since it doesn’t require any coding knowledge, to begin with. Almost everything that you may require your website to do can be done with a WordPress community-made plugin or module installation.  

Ability to Select User Roles & Access: Large news organizations may need to hire a large number of people to ensure the smooth operation of their platform. But not everyone requires website-wide full admin access. With WordPress, you’re able to manage separate user roles with varying degrees of website access depending on organizational roles. 

Highly Customizable: While WordPress itself is a very basic website-building platform, it can easily be transformed into a highly functional platform that can accommodate any type of website from any category. 

Preset Content: Another great aspect of using WordPress is, you’re free to use professionally crafted presets by any third-party design and development company. This option is largely unavailable on other CMS platforms; some simply lack these options, and some provide very limited options. 

Must-Have Elements for a Feature-rich WordPress Online Newspaper 

There are some specific sets of features and functions you need to operate a successful newspaper and print media website, and these are the following:

Modern Newspaper Layout: Newspaper agency websites are very different from any other traditional content websites, with very specific designs and content showcase layouts. With minor variations from one another, newspaper websites require well-formatted and titled news articles with stunning thumbnail presentations, with daily news bulletins and breaking news being featured on the main landing page. 

With additional navigational cues for categorized daily news and archives for past published articles. 

News Categories: It is very important for modern websites to feature categorical news. It is important to cater to the correct audience with the correct category of news. Each online news portal should have an in-depth categorized function built in. And WordPress can do just that with great precision with its in-built dashboard Menu tool. 

Author Profiles: Journalists and writers have a massive impact on society in general, and people tend to follow and interact with their favorite authors. So, it is highly recommended for every modern print media website have an interactive author profile function. 

Aggregate News Facilities: The process of compiling bits and pieces of news from various sources and outlets into a coherent narrative form is known as news aggregation. This is a must-have feature for modern news platforms to better utilize open-source data as news. 

Interactiveness: Same as with the author profiles, the audience does enjoy having an interactive platform where they can share their opinions, get in touch with the platform, share the published content, engage in polls, and more. 

Here Is a Step-By-Step Tutorial on How to Create a Newspaper Website With WordPress

Online newspaper websites are a great genre to grow your website. This is a very popular genre of website, which attracts daily visitors and readers. 

In this article, we’ll be showing you the best practices and the easiest method of creating a news website design template. 

Step 1: Getting Done with Pre-requirements

Three main pre-requirements need to be dealt with before we get down to customizing your online newspaper web template. These prerequisites are as follows:

• Registration of a domain name that best suits your electronic media brand identity. 
• Subscribing to a reliable web hosting service provider. 
• Working installation of the latest version of WordPress CMS.

Fortunately, most hosting service providers now offer domain registration as well as SSL certification. So, you can opt-in for a service that can do all of that. 

And for WordPress, you can download the latest version of WordPress CMS straight from their official website – wordpress.org/download. 

Or some hosting service providers offer simple one-click WordPress installation, with easy to follow step by step guide. You can just do that instead. 

Step 2: Choose an Attractive WordPress Newspaper Theme 

The right WordPress theme is not only important for visuals; it’s also very important for having the right features and design elements to operate a successful news page. 

For this example, we’ve selected the Binduz – WordPress Newspaper News and Magazine Theme. This is an excellent newspaper WordPress theme that comes with preset content and demo items that are required for designing a proper newspaper website online.

To install the plugin simply log into your WordPress account, and head over to Appearance > Themes > Add New.

Now click on Upload to add your brand new Binduz theme that you’ve purchased from ThemeForest, and click Install. 

And wait until the installation process finishes. 

Step 3: WordPress Newspaper Website Demo Installation 

As we mentioned earlier one of the key benefits of using the WordPress CMS platform to create your brand-new news media organization website is its pre-included demo content & online newspaper web template. 

And this is one of the reasons why we chose the Binduz – newspaper WP theme for this example, it comes with 9 professionally crafted preset homepage demos that are stunning and well-suited to accommodate newspaper websites from any genre & niche. 

To utilize a preset demo provided by Binduz we’ll first need to install the Unyson framework plugin, which comes with WordPress extension programs such as its Unyson Backup & Demo Content. 

Which is required for installing demo content from Binduz. 

Start by installing the Unyson plugin from the Dashboard > Plugins > Add New, now search for the Unyson plugin and install the plugin. 

Now to get the Unyson Backup & Demo Content extension, click on the Unyson dashboard menu that appeared after installation, and install the demo importer plugin from here.

To install the Binduz – Newspaper Theme demo head over to the WP Dashboard > Tools > Demo Content Install.

From here you can preview, pick and choose from any of these nine best newspaper website design for your website. 

To install a homepage demo, simply click install and wait for the installation process till compilation. 

Once done, you’ll be redirected to the live preview of your newly important homepage demo with all the added Elementor design layouts and feature pages. 

Step 04: Newspaper Website Customization 

Although the Binduz – WordPress Newspaper News and Magazine Theme provided all the necessary items and options that are required to operate a functional newspaper website. 

It is also possible that you need some additional features to operate your day-to-day news publication work or you are simply unsatisfied with some design elements. In this case, you can use an Exclusive Elementor addon plugin to start customizing your website. 

With this plugin, you can add a testimonial section, contact form function, social media share function, and more. 

To start customizing click on Edit with Elementor from the top of the screen and you’ll be redirected to the Elementor editor screen. 

For example with ElementsReady – Elementor Add Ons you’re able to seamlessly embed YouTube videos right into your webpage, and customize how the video block looks with Elementor using the ElementsReady Video widget. 

Search for the ER Video widget from the left-hand side screen, and create a new Elementor section by clicking on the Add New Section icon. And simply drag and drop the Elementor widget that you’re trying to use.

By default, it should look something like this. 

Now to embed the video you’d like to feature on your website, head over to YouTube and copy the link of the video you’d like to be displayed, and paste it into the Video option under the Content tab. 

From here you can not only paste the video link, but can also select the source, and toggle between options such as auto play, loop, mute, etc. 

You can follow the same steps to add any kind of feature to your newspaper website, for example, a form section. We have a detailed guide on – How To Create A Contact Form In WordPress. 

When you’re done customizing your WordPress news website design free of cost using this mighty Elementor addon plugin, you should click on Publish/Update and see the changes made in real time. 

The Bottom Line

Whether you want to create a brand newspaper website from scratch or utilize a professionally crafted WordPress theme with stunning homepage demos and pixel-perfect layouts, Elementor is hands down the best customization solution for all.

As shown Elementor and its associated Elementor Addons plugins are a great set of tools for creating stunning well diverse WordPress websites with ease. And utilizing community-made themes, templates, and demos can drastically reduce your workload. 

If you’ve found this article helpful in any way please consider sharing it with someone who is looking to create their own professional business website with Elementor. And if you have some concerns please feel free to mention them in the comment section.