In 2010, Richmond's leading alternative weekly came to INM United for help with a redesign of their website. They wanted something fresh and clean that would be easy to navigate and expose more of their content to visitors.
Looking towards a touch-screen future, they initially wanted something similar to the New York Times Skimmer. I was concerned that a fixed-height site wouldn't give them the flexibility they needed in terms of ad sizes and changing content/feature types.
Designing with data
We used Crazy Egg to track clicks on Style's old website, which produces visual heatmaps of the areas users go to the most.
Based on this data, it was obvious users were gravitating towards Food & Drink, Search, and the Recent Comments.
v1 - Features Header
Rated 7.34 by users on a 1-10 scale
Using our research, this is the first version of the site I designed. We presented this design, along with another version, to a group of Style readers who expressed interest in providing feedback about the new site.
User Response to v1
Overall, user response was very positive to v1. Based on feedback on both versions of the site, we decided to remove the features header—it took up too much real estate and pushed the logo down too far—and add more photos to the article presentation.
v2 - Still struggling with ad integration
This is the second iteration I designed. It includes more photos with the articles, some well-defined section headers, and prominent food & drink articles. However, I was still having trouble finding the best way to integrate the advertising that needed to go on the page.
Final Design
Rated 7.89 by users on a 1-10 scale
In the final version, we integrated serif type for the article descriptions and moved the ads to a banner at the top, along with a few other small tweaks.
