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IHT.com: Site Redesign (2007)

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Created: 05/06/08

Last Edited: 06/05/08

Appreciations: 9

Comments (1)

Project Info

Owners

Michael Cosentino

Credits

Steven Schattenberg

Tags

user experience, news, design direction, development

Attribution Non-commercial
No Derivatives

From: Michael Cosentino's Portfolio

Fields:

Interaction Design, Web Design, Web Development

IHT.com: 2007 Redesign

When redesigning IHT.com, my main goal was to present the news in a clean and modern way, while at the same time retaining the familiar elements of the newspaper. Classic news design practices such as emphasis on whitespace, thin borders around content, and large photos would now be enhanced by large, web-friendly type in Georgia and Arial, light gradients to give the page texture, and the many interactive elements users have come to expect from a modern news site.

The result is a homepage instantly familiar to readers of the International Herald Tribune print edition. Alongside the day's top news, visitors can browse videos, photo slideshows, news feeds, most-emailed lists, join reader discussions, build financial portfolios, download custom news podcasts, and more. A special emphasis has been placed on keeping pages lightweight and SEO-friendly, and the result is significant monthly traffic increases since launching in July 2007.

To achieve the goal of launching the redesign in six months, I assessed the needs of all editorial, advertising, and marketing stakeholders before creating wireframes, design mockups, and prototypes for the homepage. I then worked closely with the CMS development team for implementation. The site is 100% XHTML/XML compliant and layout is controlled completely by CSS.

Primary Navigation Unit

In order to simplify the site navigation and avoid cumbersome dropdown menus to access subsections, I developed a three-tiered design which features all sections exposed at all times, ranked in order of editorial importance. This "cloud-style" scheme allows the user to easily travel from one section to another.

The "News Hole"

One the most popular requests from homepage editors is more flexible layouts in the "news hole" -- the area with the lead story and ranked articles selected by producers. In response I designed an interchangeable 2-column template system which can be switched via the publishing system at any time. There are five possible layouts to choose from, based on the editorial needs at any given moment. By developing the templates using 100% CSS, the layout can be rearranged without the need to make modifications to the source XHTML.