It’s finally live! We’ve been working on the redesign of several pages of MNN.com once December and as of last week, we have phase 1 done. We still have plenty to do, but it’s a start! Development is still working out a few of the bugs, but considering the change stat were made, there isn’t an awful lot to fix.
Phase 1 included:
– reformatting the homepage to a more clean, streamlined, and easier to update layout
– removing the floating share bar and widening the pages across the board
– creating new share modules
– making the site easier to read
– adjusting the layouts of the stories, galleries, blogs, channel pages and ecoglossaries
– getting the entire site to adhere to a newly implemented style guide
– updating several of the right rail widgets
and a bunch of smaller tasks.
Phase 2 is currently in progress which will include making the site fully responsive, updating the user pages and registration, hopefully updating the quizzes, and redesigning some of the one-off pages like the about us page and the newsletter sign-ups. I’m also hoping we can address the masthead in this phase as well which will have a bit bigger impact on the overall look and feel of the site. Phase 2 will probably be done in Q2 of this year.
Involved in the design were myself as the designer, the editor in chef, director of social, President and CEO. Input was given from other departments, especially editorial when it came to readability and content flow, but that was pretty much everyone. Of course there are things I would still change, but I won some battles and lost others. Overall, it’s a HUGE improvement over the previous site.
The biggest challenge was more so going through and streamlining the site. Previously there could be anywhere from 2-6 different fonts per page, unintentionally. There were also 19 hades of gray, colors and font sizes were inconsistent, sometimes links were blue, sometimes green…there was no rhyme or reason. I created a style guide to put it in writing for all to see what the specs and guidelines were. The style guide is still expanding, and always will.
You can check it out at MNN.com
I’ve included some images of the homepage before and after the redesign below since that is what has changed the most by far!
Before redesign:
After redesign:
