Bloomberg homepage gets more headlines, smaller photos

Jed Sandberg, Michael Shane and Paul Maya of Bloomberg’s web operation sent the below note this morning to the Bloomberg staff:

Folks,

Later today we’re rolling out some updates to the Bloomberg.com homepage.

The visual impact of our current site is distinctive and dramatic, but the update should help us solve some challenges we’ve had when there’s more news than we can fit. Designed in collaboration with Code & Theory, version 1.1 reveals a broader range of stories and content types to illustrate the breadth and metabolism of Bloomberg. You’ll notice many more headlines “above the fold” so that readers can immediately scan the most important stories of the day. Packaging of related stories is now much better, and market data is more efficiently laid out. We’re also introducing deks beneath our stories to help draw readers in. What did we lose? There are fewer pixels devoted to some of those beautiful images. We’ll miss them, but there’s always the article page.

Web design is constantly evolving, so we’ll have more updates in the coming months, including a new global navigation bar and corresponding adjustments to section fronts. We’ll also have a number of homepage enhancements that we’ll tell you about as we approach their deployment.

In the weeks ahead, we’ll also update Bloomberg Politics’ article pages and homepage to support the campaign tracker. The launch of the Asian regional homepage is currently slated for the fall. Work is also being done to support a major SEO audit and features related to advertising campaigns. And the coming quarters will include the release of the new Markets homepage and the launch of the new fast commentary initiative.

We welcome your feedback (which is a good thing, since we always tend to get plenty of it). Please don’t hesitate to ask any questions; we’d like to provide as much detail on future developments as we can.

Thanks, Jed Sandberg, Michael Shane and Paul Maya