WSJ.com redesign coming Tuesday

The Wall Street Journal‘s Web site will unveil its redesign on Tuesday, adding features such as a key next to stories to denote content available only to subscribers.

Overall changes and enhancements to WSJ.com include new design and layout, improved navigation, expanded content and features available for all users as well as multiple benefits exclusive to WSJ.com’s more than one million subscribers, including Journal Community, a new Management section and expanded What’s News and Heard on the Street content. Additional tools and content sets will continue to roll out over the coming months.

“The redesign is a crucial moment in the e-evolution of The Wall Street Journal and Dow Jones,” said Robert Thomson, managing editor of The Journal, in a statement. “We will be providing general readers with an easier-to-navigate selection of great reporting and fine writing, while our fast-growing global business audience will have access to a far greater range of analysis and intelligence. In coming months, we will further embellish our content triptych, providing readers with free, premium and super-premium information that they will be able to customize to suit their personal and professional needs.”

WSJ.com has experienced significant traffic growth, with an 84 percent increase in visitors year-to-date over 2007 and a 112 percent increase from the same period in 2006, according to Omniture.

Highlights of the redesign available to all users include:

• Overall new look and feel with modern design and streamlined, horizontal navigation as well as more varied home and section pages;
• Expanded content in small business, technology, U.S. and world news, politics, personal finance and lifestyle categories;
• The introduction of the “Newsreel,” a visual and text-driven tool atop all story pages highlighting the most important stories in each major section of the site with direct navigation among them;
• New video player, photo slide show viewer and interactive graphics;
• Redesigned “story pages” provide related analysis, additional content, video, audio, graphics and more;
• The newly launched WSJ.com Mobile Reader for BlackBerry smartphones.

Read more here.