The Economist and the redesign of its website

Lucinda Southern of Digiday writes about The Economist’s web redesign, which is rolling out slowly.

Southern writes, “A year ago, The Economist had a new design ready to go. Rather than push it live and trumpet the new site in a press release, the publisher took a go-slow approach, showing it to just .5 percent of its visitors a year ago and steadily increasing the exposure over nine months while collecting and analyzing some 20,000 comments from readers.

“The go-slow approach allowed The Economist to make changes. For instance, The Economist found readers wanting more content on the homepage, despite designers typical love of white space. After increasing the number of links visible to readers on site, the number of people clicking through from the homepage to another article increased by 8 percent.

“‘We had made it cleaner and clearer, but we had nearly gone too far, people scanning for the news found that there weren’t enough links,’ said Robin Raven, vp product and reader strategy, global circulation at The Economist.

“The current homepage has a more uniform design than its predecessor, with content sorted neatly into cards. The number of topics in the main navigation bar has been cut from six to three, and the print magazine is given more prominence than before.”

Read more here.