Recently, I found out about an award called an SNO Distinguished Site. It sounded exciting, so I looked into the requirements to be qualified for the award.
My first thought upon skimming through the list of requirements was "whoaaaah." There are 6 badges that a website must achieve in order to become an SNO Distinguished Site. I realized that becoming an SNO Distinguished Site was going to take a lot more work than I expected. It also wasn't a plausible attempt for this school year's newspaper, considering that there is only a month and a half left of the school year and there are already a few requirements that we are incapable of achieving this school year. I realized just the level The Raider Voice needs to reach to become one of the top school newspapers in the country.
However, as discouraging as looking at the requirements for an SNO Distinguished Site may have felt, it also gave me a new source of motivation and has allowed me to more clearly envision what I want for The Raider Voice next school year as Editor in Chief. My goal for next school year is to become an SNO Distinguished Site. It's going to be hard, but it's not impossible and I believe that if my staff and I are willing to put in the time and effort, this is most certainly an achievable goal.
I spoke to my adviser, Mrs. Rodriguez, about this. Yesterday we had an online meeting with a graphic designer from SNO, Alex McNamee, to discuss our website and how we can improve it. I was able to redesign the website by changing the layout to a more user-friendly and modern look, updating the fonts to ones I like better, and editing the logo in Photoshop so it is bigger and finally centered on the page (something that has been bothering me since I first joined the newspaper haha.) Then, after going through each of the badge requirements with Alex and making finishing touches on the website design with my Editor in Chief, Dani Tosca, I submitted the website for the Site Excellence Badge. It's one of the six badges, and one of the six steps on our way to becoming an SNO Distinguished Site.