By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor
The Denver Post experienced two facelifts late last year: to its brick-and-mortar home downtown and to its virtual home on the World Wide Web.
The flagship paper of MediaNews Group Inc. is now sharing a roof with its joint operating agreement rival, the (Denver) Rocky Mountain News, after moving into the newly constructed Denver Newspaper Agency headquarters. The $90 million building, just down the street from the Colorado State Capitol, was formally dedicated last month.
The Post’s redesigned Web site, meantime, kicked off in October. Like The Post’s new building, the site is now cleaner and boasts new features, including those aimed at keeping people from “stubbing,” or leaving quickly after reading only one article.
“What we want to do is have a person find the article that they like and keep them on the site longer by presenting them with other useful features,” said Mark Cardwell, The Post’s managing editor for new media and strategic development. “This will keep them coming back more frequently.”
Bigger screens
The new denverpost.com was also designed to take advantage of wider, higher-resolution computer monitors.
“We can put more features on wider pages, which means we can present more articles,” said Cardwell, an electronic news veteran who joined The Post last year to oversee its online efforts.
“Hopefully, we can keep people more engaged and give them more places to go.”
The Denver Post’s redesign (bottom image) takes advantage of wider, higher-resolution computer monitors and introduces such features as tabbed sections, not found in the older version of www.denverpost.com.
As part of the redesign, performed in conjunction with Denver-based Indigio Group Inc., The Post migrated to tab-based navigation. When a user scrolls over a specific tab, additional sub-categories for the section become available.
Indigio and Post designers also moved several key features, such as subscription customer service, access to the paper’s PDF electronic version and RSS support, to the top of the page to make them more accessible.
Graphically, denverpost.com now sports a prominent photo of the day on the upper-left side of the page, as does each news section.
The Post has seven employees dedicated to its online staff, six of which are in editorial, but the site has additional support through MediaNews’ corporate IT department.
“They handle our servers and uptime and system administration,” Cardwell said of the 60-member group, which oversees approximately 75 MediaNews Web sites.
The Post last redesigned its Web site in August 2004 (see Newspapers & Technology, September 2004).
Attracting readers
While the retooled denverpost.com includes significant adjustments in the layout of content, the new look is just a part of MediaNews’ overall goal to attract readers to the site for more than just news stories.
“We will make money in search, by offering readers search functions,” William Dean Singleton, Post publisher and chairman, said at a January 2006 forum discussing his philosophy on Web revenues.
To that end, The Post is working to bolster its search features so that readers can find more on denverpost.com, Cardwell said. Users can now search through the paper’s display ads and the paper will upgrade its employment ads once its Yahoo HotJobs co-branded venture goes live this spring (see related story, page 1).
“Search is becoming a way for people to navigate the Web,” Cardwell said. “We have to continually improve our search just like Google (does) and we’re doing that in a number of different ways.”
For example, if a user were to type “furniture” in the search bar, denverpost.com not only displays furniture-related news and blogs on the left column, but print ads on the right in a bid to link marketers’ messages to perspective customers.
As for its employment ads, the Yahoo link will elevate the role HotJobs plays at the paper, Cardwell said.
“We have sort of a hidden technology where HotJobs is powering a big portion of our employment section right now,” he said. “We’re going to be using HotJobs across all of MediaNews Group and it will get a higher profile.”
In the long run, The Post and other consortium Web sites will also add other Yahoo features.
Breaking news on Web before print
The redesign of denverpost.com also bought with it a change in philosophy in how The Post covers news. Where the paper formerly held breaking news exclusively for its print issue, it now posts news as it happens, even if it means its archrival Rocky Mountain News will have access to an important story.
Case in point, Cardwell said, was how the paper posted a story about the killing of a trial witness.
“It’ll be in the paper tomorrow, but we had it written and posted on the site at 8:30 a.m.” he said. “We beat TV and radio and maintained our place as the primary source of news in Colorado.”
Cardwell said site traffic has increased since the new design was launched, but declined to release numbers because results were skewed by the fact that November was an election month.
“We’re up from November 2005, but I’m not sure how meaningful that is” because of election traffic, he said.
Web site Snapshot
Statistics Snapshot
www.DenverPost.com
Launched: 1995
Last major redesign: August 2004
New Web site launch: October 2006
Selected awards:
*1998 Colorado Press Association: Colorado’s Best Online Daily Newspaper.
*2000 Digital Edge Awards: Public Service Award, circulation more than 250,000.
*2006 Colorado Press Association: Best breaking news site in Colorado.
Audience metrics & analysis: Omniture
Metrics: (per month)
Total unique audience: 731,245
Total page views: 8,343,071
Visitors HHI $25,000 to $49,999: 147,902
Visitors HHI $50,000 to $99,999: 352,423
Visitors HHI $100,000+: 183,906
Unique visitors: 731,245
Active reach %: 0.52
Web page views: 8,343,071
Web pages per visitor: 11
Visits per visitor: 2.60
Time per visitor: 00: 10: 41 (hh:mm:ss)
Source Nielsen//NetRatings
Panel: Combined Home and Work
Period: July 2006
Source: NAA NAdbase
Subscribe to:
Post Comments (Atom)
No comments:
Post a Comment