The Daily Mirror today unveils a new-look website, at mirror.co.uk

Before: how the site looked last week

Mirror Online publisher Matt Kelly says in an introductory post that the “cleaner and less cluttered” design will make better use of photography and video.

Content is organised into seven sections: News, Sport, 3am, Lifestyle, Money, Play and Opinion. Comments are encouraged on stories, and sharing articles has been made easier.

Kelly said:

We constantly improve our website and as much as we believe the new look Mirror Online is a big step forward, we know there’ll be things we haven’t got completely right.

PaidContent has a video interview with Matt Kelly and Mirror managing director Chris Ellis:

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The Indy has a bold new masthead to celebrate its 25th birthday. It certainly sticks out among all the other papers in the shop, which can be no bad thing for the relatively low-circulation title.

The new-look paper also comes with a new typeface and headline fonts.

The other big change is that the “Viewspaper”, a pullout comment section created by recently-departed editor Simon Kelner, has been ditched.

New editor Chris Blackhurst said:

We have decided to use the occasion of the paper’s 25th birthday for a makeover. The masthead is bolder – still ‘the Independent’, complete with eagle, but now more striking and harder to miss on the news stands.

The body typeface and headline fonts we use have been made more readable. The other, main alteration is that the Viewspaper has gone. We thought long and hard about this. Viewspaper was created to draw attention to the unrivalled quality of the Independent’s commentators.

We continue to take pride in this quality. But since taking over three months ago, I’ve become aware that the Viewspaper could be something of a ghetto, to be taken out and read later – but in truth, put on one side and, during a busy day, all too often forgotten.

He added that the aim was to create a “faster, more accessible and urgent paper, one that is easily navigated and that puts you in no doubt what The Independent stands for”.

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10,000 words takes a look at the new Washington Post site design. Changes include an “enhanced” commenting system allowing editors to prominently feature certain comments.

According to 10,000 Words, the new system “marks one of the most forward-thinking aspects of the redesign”.

The new design is much more modern and clean than the old homepage that looked like something out of the late ’90s. According to a press release from The Post, the new design is “intended to further reader engagement and discussion around Post journalism and showcase more multimedia content”.

Full article on 10,000 Words at this link

See the Post’s own innovations blog for more on its redesign.

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The BBC today launched its newly designed blogs homepage, designed to ease navigation across the site’s almost 300 blogs.

Changes include new sections for interesting quotes, a ‘latest on blogs’ feature and ‘my recently viewed’ for greater personalisation.

The site is currently in Beta.

Read more here.

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For those designing (or redesigning) a news site, this 10,000 Words blog is worth a look. It concentrates on four ‘fixable sins’ of news site design: swamps of share buttons; layers of navigation; avalanches of links; cluttered sidebars.

Let’s be honest: In general, news site design isn’t pretty. I know I’m not the first or last to say it, but I do have a theory about why. It starts off innocently enough — an article, navigation, some ads. But as new tools, gadgets, buttons, widgets, extensions and plugins are introduced to the news consumption scene, that once simple design becomes cluttered with bells and whistles that hold the content hostage.

Full post at this link.

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Plans for a new sub-editing hub for News Limited’s titles in Australia, part of News Corporation, have been announced. More than 100 sub-editors and designers will move to the centralised production operation.

Full story on the Australian at this link…

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“The tension is unbearable. The office becomes like ‘Lord of the Flies’. We split into tribes and dredge up weaknesses in our colleagues. We speculate. We make lists. It’s our survival mechanism. It’s awful,” writes Sarah Slobin (@sarahslo) who was infographics director at Fortune magazine before being made redundant.

Here Slobin describes, in a personal and descriptive piece for an issue of ‘Design’, how ‘nothing stays the same’ when you’re made unemployed.

Full story at this link…

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“My mind races between sadness, disbelief, anger and a cold, whispering fear that what we are facing as an industry could very well do the rest of us in,” writes Jonathon Berlin.

In a visually interesting post, Berlin, who used to be designer and assistant design director at the newspaper, shows his appeciation for the things he learnt there.

Full post at this link…

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“In its 30th annual ‘The Best of Newspaper Design™ Creative Competition,’ the Society for News Design has named four newspapers from Europe and one from Mexico as ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers,™” the organisation’s website reports.

This year’s SND30 five top ‘World’s Best-Designed Newspapers™’ are:

• Akzia, Moscow, Russia, biweekly, circulation 200,000
• Eleftheros Tipos, Athens, Greece, daily, circulation, 86,000
• Expresso, Paço de Arcos, Portugal, weekly, circulation 120,000
• The News, Mexico City, daily, circulation 10,000
• Welt am Sonntag, Berlin, weekly, 400,000

Full story at this link…

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We love a list here at Journalism.co.uk – here’s 10,000 Words’ guide to why ’50 million-word stories’ and ‘no links whatsoever’ don’t work for online news sites.

Full story at this link…

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Not wanting to be left out following a new look for The Sun’s homepage last Friday, a Telegraph.co.uk redesign and the last stage of the Guardian’s site revamp, Mirror.co.uk began its relaunch on Monday.

Starting with changes to the homepage, the rest of the site will follow suit and new features will be introduced in the coming weeks, an announcement on the site said.

On the homepage a most read/most emailed/highest rated articles box has been added and the left-hand navigation bar done away with. Links to Mirror.co.uk subscription services are neatly lined up across the top of the homepage.

Elsewhere the site’s video player has been upgraded (though the ‘see more videos’ tab opens up another window still), more picture galleries added and the blogs section overhauled with some new additions.

So how does this first stage of redevelopment compare with its competitor’s new looks?

It’s certainly colourful with the addition of multicoloured section headings and if you navigate better with images than this is for you – though personally I find the block of images that dominate the ‘above the fold’ area a tad too busy.

More embedded video, which seems to be happening across the article pages, is a plus, as is the vastly improved ‘below the fold’ on the homepage, which has been tidied up no end.

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Colour should be used with caution, says the former Sunday Times editor.

Black and white photos and text are too often neglected, says Evans, who adds that good design has the potential to ‘sustain’ newspapers.

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Speaking at yesterday’s preview of the Telegraph.co.uk redesign, both chief information officer Paul Cheesbrough and digital editor Edward Roussel said the new site was aimed at ‘deeper engagement’ with users.

Both declined to comment on whether the new site would bring success in terms of ABCe figures, even suggesting the amount of content/page views per user was more important at this stage than an increased numbers of visitors.

“If we have doubled the amount of content that each person is consuming [by the end of the year] then that’s great,” said Roussel.

The current average for the site is 16 page views per person per month, he added.

A raft of improvements have been made in the new design to address the issue of engagement. Firstly improved search and navigation features to help users find the content they are after more quickly and keep them on the site.

Changes to the site’s servers have also been implemented with a series of international servers set up so the experience of accessing the site is the same wherever you are, Cheesbrough explained.

These changes were made necessary after ‘power outages’ on the site last year, which brought Telegraph.co.uk down for prolonged periods. In contrast the site is now the fastest news site behind the BBC, Cheesbrough claimed.

One of the most significant changes for me – and the one which lends itself most immediately to both engagement and traffic goals – is an increase in embedded video.

Following hot on the heels of the BBC and FT, who have both made the move to embedded video, the new Telegraph.co.uk will embed its video content within articles across the site and lose the standalone Telegraph TV player box on the homepage.

The BBC’s Pete Clifton told Journalism.co.uk previously that the conversion rate – the number of people reading the text article and viewing the video footage – was around 40 per cent for embedded video and only 2 per cent when video was housed in a separate player.

Initial trials of embedding on Telegraph.co.uk have produced similarly positive results, said Cheesbrough, with a 30 per cent conversion rate for embedded videos compared to a 3 per cent rate for Telegraph TV.

It’s a logical progression that boosts views and keeps the user engaged for longer, and is part of what the team behind the Telegraph redesign refer to as ‘the concept of the article as the homepage’.

This shows an awareness that the homepage is no longer the main point of entry – around half of the site’s traffic comes through aggregators. Putting as much effort into the design and accessibiilty of every page of your site, as most publications put into their homepage, could well be a winning strategy for both traffic and engagement.

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Silicon Valley Insider talked to Marc Frons, chief technology officer of NYTimes digital, about the projects he’s working on and the development that they’ll be rolling out in the near future. Here’s a brief overview:

Things we have already covered:

• Those APIs: the plan is to eventually let developers outside of the Times play with its content and create new sites or services.
• Times People: expect more development so it’s not just a browser plug-in.

The shock of the new:

• Widgets: Customisable box of Times stories, video, slideshows and the rest on your blog or social network page? Yes please.
• Aggregation: It bought Blogrunner an eternity ago and uses it now just to pull content from partner sites into NYTimes – think PaidContent, CNET stuff on the Tech pages. But ‘bigger plans’ are afoot – Frons won’t say more though.
• Apps: Yes, NYTimes.com is working on apps for Apple’s forthcoming iPhone store.

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South Africa’s Mail & Guardian newspaper has substantially revamped its website, in the process introducing a series of new features to improve usability.

M&G Online’s general manager Matthew Buckland blogged recently about the use of Thompson Reuters Open Calais semantic tagging technology to organise and cross-reference all the site’s content for the relaunch.

In addition to this the revamp has introduced a number of key features:

Registration and dashboard

• Like the Guardian in the UK, the new M&G site now allows users to save clippings of favourite articles and story history while browsing.
• Comment on articles and debate with other readers

New features

• It has also introduced a topics A-Z: A list of people, places, subjects and organisations covered by the site
• Added a feature – NewsSwarm – that allows users to see who is viewing which article in real time
• Integrated articles with Google Maps
• Make the popular cartoon sections searchable and tagged
• Added easy exploration of e-commerce areas: jobs, cars, dating, property and shopping
• Allowed users to view related articles from outside the news website.
• Added video feeds

Semantic tagging – a key new element

• Tag clouds of subjects, people and places on the home page and news sections
• Articles regionally organised and can be viewed by country or city with South African news at town, city or provincial level
• Articles are also tagged with names of cities, countries, companies or organisations, and people, which can be viewed in the Topics A-Z section

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