Archant starts website redesign with Evening Star revamp
New look Star site is first of company-wide relaunches
– 1 min read
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There used to be something here that couldn't be migrated - please contact us at info@journalism.co.uk if you'd like to see this updated! Archant's Ipswich Evening Star website has been redesigned as part of a plans to overhaul the regional newspaper group's online network.
The new look EveningStar24 site, which went live on January 1, has a wider page format with tabs for news, features and sport content placed in a navigation bar across the top of the site.
Links to commercial sites and directories are now located in a shorter left-hand menu, creating a cleaner and less cluttered site layout.
The redesign of the site, which currently attracts 100,000 unique users a month, has been developed from Archant Suffolk's football site Green'Un24 .
"We've looked at a new template which freshens up the look and makes it more intuitive and easier for readers to find what they want. There's more content immediately visible," Stuart McCreery, managing director of Archant Suffolk, told Journalism.co.uk.
Much of the redesign has been based on user feedback and traffic and engagement stats for the old site, he added.
In reponse to user feedback more space has been allocated for photo galleries and more prominence given to the family notices section of the site launched in December - an unexpected success, McCreery said.
The new design will be rolled out across the publisher's network of websites starting with Suffolk and then the East Anglian Daily Times site, he added. Archant recently introduced mapped versions of its property and jobs listings to its newspaper sites, but plans to make use of geotagged news articles are still under development, although journalists are already tagging articles with postcodes, said McCreery.
Written by
Laura Oliver is a freelance journalist, a contributor to the Reuters Institute for the Study of Journalism, co-founder of The Society of Freelance Journalists and the former editor of Journalism.co.uk (prior to it becoming JournalismUK)
