Freedom Communications unit breathes new life into Web sites

By Marcelo Duran
Associate Editor

Freedom Interactive, the online arm of Freedom Communications, this month plans to cap a company-wide redesign of all of its Web sites.

Freedom Interactive handles Web sites for 33 daily and 77 weekly newspapers across the country, including sites supporting The Orange County (Calif.) Register and The Gazette in Colorado Springs, Colo.

The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, kicked off its renovated site last fall and was one of the first papers to roll out the new design.

“The new site is easier to navigate and has a more pleasing look and feel than the previous version,” said Ernie Rodriguez, The Monitor’s director of Internet operations. “It has a truly interactive events calendar” — from Zvents —“and commenting tools on all articles.”

Rodriguez said it took about six weeks to launch the new look.

Better experience

“The hope is to provide our users a more engaging experience, in a more pleasing environment that will entice them to stay longer on our site,” he said.

The Monitor in McAllen, Texas, was one of the first Freedom papers to roll out a revamped Web site.

Freedom Interactive Vice President of Marketing Linda Fisk said among the most prominent features in the redesign is a tabbed A-box that highlights the most requested and most-viewed stories on each paper’s Web site.

“We created a fixed promotional rotator to highlight special content features, contests, sweepstakes and promotions,” she said. “This allows our audience to quickly see what’s new and exciting on the site.”

Each site also includes a community area that features photos, polls and online exclusive content.

Fisk said that this area is especially popular with users and allows each paper to provide content with a uniquely local focus.

The redesign also included prominent placement of online classified information to help increase visibility of marketers’ ad messages.

Fisk said the redesigns were based on consumer research efforts designed to determine what customers were seeking online.

“We implemented a network-wide consumer survey asking representative samples of our users in every Freedom market about their experience on each of our Web sites,” Fisk said. “We asked about their visitation habits, the content they liked, what they thought was missing and why they visit our sites.”

Based on that quantitative research, Freedom Interactive conducted more qualitative research through a series of usability tests where managers and site designers watched consumers navigate through the sites and complete a series of tasks.

“We asked for the consumers’ opinions, their impressions and their recommendations,” she said. “We asked what they liked and didn’t like about the design, the content, the products and services, the navigation and more.”

Freedom tested the new look in two markets before making final revisions and launching the final redesign company-wide.