Brady Discusses Post.com

From E&P:

At the Washington Post’s site, which recently saw a full redesign of its homepage, editor Jim Brady also has found that this kind of back-and-forth with readers over changes has become part of the process.

“We see a lot of feedback about the homepage,” he says, “and based on these, and on focus groups, we’ve made some changes before, during, and after the redesign launched.”

Brady says that the genesis of his site’s redesign, which took a total of eight months to complete, started taking shape as he and his staff saw that the site couldn’t quite hold all the things they were doing. As the way they covered news evolved, he says they felt the site needed to evolve as well.

“Your homepage reflects what you are,” says Brady, “and we needed ours to be more reflective of what the site was about.”

In particular, Brady says, while the site’s coverage had expanded its video coverage (so much that it even won an Emmy award in 2006), there didn’t seem to be enough room on the homepage to feature it all and make users aware of all the multimedia elements that were available. He also thought the site needed to be “cleaned up” a little.

“There were too many elements, and you couldn’t find things easily enough,” he says. “I mean, we have 70 blogs. And we also wanted to show off a little more of the feature stuff, giving it a similar treatment to multimedia.”

To accomplish this, he and his team added a number of new elements to the homepage; cascading style sheets were created to improve navigability to the site’s different sections; a box for discussions was moved higher up on the page; and a multimedia strip was put beneath the top headlines to feature photo galleries, interactive elements, and video.

On the technical side, Brady says it was important that the new page would be optimized to load quickly, as well as to make sure the major elements on the page would be picked up by Google, which is responsible for a large portion of the site’s traffic. Additionally, the new design has to be “tested like crazy” to make sure that it will work with every Web browser and operating system.

Brady says that, in terms of what his staff is producing every day, there has been some change in the workload. His Web team is now responsible for maintaining the multimedia strip on the homepage, and for making sure that there’s a good mix between video, photo, and text elements on the page. The discussions box on the top of the page also has to be monitored, he says, and there is more responsibility for the editors of the section pages as well.

So far the results have been positive, with traffic up on the homepage, but he admits that reader comments have only been about 50% positive.

“People had really gotten so used to the site, and some weren’t thrilled at things not being where they were before,” says Brady. “That’s the inherent risk of redesigns, or of moving anything anywhere. Even moving stuff up on the page is not necessarily going to make people happy. When you move things you take risks. People get very wedded to how they use Web sites, and at first blush people aren’t always happy with something new.”

Launch a social media campaign that will build your brand and deliver results in our online Social Media Marketing Boot Camp starting June 7. Speakers include Abigail Cusick (Bravo Digital), Gregory Galant (Sawhorse Media), Alex Leo (Thomson Reuters Digital), Jim Tobin (Ignite Social Media), and many more. Read the reviews.