By: Jay DeFoore In Web time, three years is an eternity. So the recent redesign of
KnoxNews.com, the Web site of the Knoxville News Sentinel, was a long time coming.
Jack Lail, Knoxnews.com's Managing Editor/MultiMedia, says his site "badly" needed a facelift, pointing out that its previous homepage ran "a mile long" down the screen. Kathy Schaefer, KnoxNews' Classified/MultiMedia Sales Manager, concurs, saying readers and advertisers often complained that the site looked "dated."
Working with the E.W. Scripps' digital media division, which is based across town and headed up by Jay Small, Scripps' Director of Online Content and Operations/Newspapers, Lail had a redesigned site up and running in just under a month.
Although the site that launched in late spring is an esthetic improvement, to be sure, Lail says the need for bigger ad placements was the driving force for the redesign. The most obvious departure from the old site is the interactive video ads that sit in prominent spots on the homepage and inside article pages. The ads begin playing automatically upon load, and users can turn them off or on with the click of a mouse.
The redesigned site actually has fewer ad positions than before, but the new ad spots are larger and more interactive, which Schaefer says is more attractive to online advertisers. As a result, Schaefer expects online ad revenue to increase "in a big way," and she's considering raising the CPM to account for the larger visibility and interactive features of the ads.
On the content side, the redesigned site sports a Flash-based centerpiece at the top of the homepage that showcases the day's four main headlines and photos. The site dispenses with left-side navigational elements altogether in favor of main section buttons that run across the top of the page. Lail says the old site was designed for a screen resolution of 800x600 pixels; the new design, set at 1200 pixels wide, brings more headlines above the fold and reduces clutter, he says.
Three more of Scripps' sites have redesigns scheduled for this year. Although all the Scripps' sites operate on the same content management system (a " deeply customized version of Vignette") and are based to a certain degree on templates, Small says each will have its own look and feel. "Fortunately, modern Web structural methods, especially current techniques using Cascading Style Sheets [CSS], allow us to create Web page components in HTML that can be used on different sites with different appearances," Small says.
Scripps' corporate online division will provide consulting help on the visuals and implementations, but the local sites will have ultimate control.
"Some [sites] will pick up more of those HTML template components and style them much the way we did for knoxnews. Others will use fewer of the components and style the ones they do use to look a lot different," Small says.
The version of Vignette Scripps' interactive division uses is more than four years old, which means Small's team has to push the technology as far as it can go to build the functionality his sites need. But rather than wait for a "next generation" system to come along, Small says his team is redesigning now so that they can get the most strategic value for their efforts.
"Every content system has its limitations, which become more pronounced as the system ages while Web standards evolve," Small says. "Suffice it to say the kind of design flexibility I'm describing will be a key requirement in each new technology component we build or buy in the coming years."
* Knoxnews.com won a
2005 EPpy Award for Best Special Feaure in an Internet Service (News or Event) for sites with fewer than 1 million monthly viewers.
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