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Credit: r-z on Flickr. Some rights reserved.

The website for Time magazine launched an "adaptive" redesign this week with a 'three-lane highway' layout, including a breaking news stream, a list of top stories, and a channel for interactive and "deeper reporting".

The design follows an ongoing effort to make the website – which reported 23 million unique visitors via ComScore in January – "do 24/7 what Time has always done for the week", Edward Felsenthal, managing editor of the site, told Journalism.co.uk.

On the desktop homepage, the content is split into a "three-lane highway", Felsenthal said, including a breaking news stream, which runs along the left-hand side of the screen on desktop, and a central stream featuring a list of what Time editors consider the "12 most important stories you need to know about right now", titled The Brief. 

Article pages also feature a left-hand column offering the 'latest' and most 'popular' content, in terms of most read and most shared. This section will "follow the users no matter where you go on the site", he added, meaning those who access content "through side doors" such as social or search, will still "get the news happening now". Traffic from social in particular is said to be up 284 per cent year-on-year.

The third main stream on the desktop homepage is a "slower lane", Felsenthal explained, "in which you can take in the view and experience Time's deeper reporting"

The redesign of the site - which first launched as "fully responsive" back in 2012 - was "really built with mobile in mind", Felsenthal told Journalism.co.uk, highlighting that mobile now amounts for 45 per cent of traffic to the site – said to be based on ComScore statistics for January – which is reported to be a 27 per cent increase year-on-year.

As a result, the redesign aims to be "extremely easy to scan", Felsenthal explained, adding that Time "wanted to make sure [readers] could get a fast, smart take on the news that’s happening right now". In comparison, the homepage screen on mobile focuses on The Brief stream, with the ability to move to different sections of the site via a menu bar.

As well as appealing to mobile and social readers, the redesign is also intended "to encourage" increased engagement.

The new design "does a much better job of presenting more options that might encourage you to stick around than our old site", Felsenthal said, adding it was "very intentionally built that way".

It also aims to support efforts by Time to build up its subscriber base, who pay to access stories from the magazine online.

The site's rise in web traffic over the past year, of 118 per cent from January 2013 to January 2014, has prompted a 36 per cent boost "in the number of people who then pay to read some of the premium content". Felsenthal explained.

"Part of the strategy is to grow our total audience but also grow the percentage of that audience that dives in to read the magazine content".

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