About.com
< case 01 > About Site
Article
The article page was a very complex design problems, with several complaints:
- Floating tool bar
- Multiple columns of content and navigation
- Incorp advertising content
- Modular blocks which can be repositioned to suit contentBlog
Search Results
Browse Subjects
Site Index Events
Site Index
Channel Browse
Home
Home page is broken in to modular areas, which can be repositioned.
Image and background styling particular to home page.
The article page was a very complex design problems, with several complaints:
Home page is broken in to modular areas, which can be repositioned.Background
About.com, a near-top-10 Web property now owned by New York Times Digital and used by one out of every five people on the Internet.
In the era of Google, many of About's 20 million monthly visitors arrive at lower-level pages amidst the site's 23 channels and 50,000-plus topics. This meant that top-down navigation flowing from the homepage was no longer as effective in guiding people around the site. As a result, fewer visitors were penetrating the site deeply, limiting pageviews - an important metric for the site. In addition, About needed a more streamlined mechanism for managing site content and structure - particularly in this new search-engine-oriented context - given the fact that amidst its thousands of topics, there were effectively hundreds of different types of sites that people could visit. They also needed a new, fresher visual design that still corresponded with the brand they had built.
Role
- Visual design
- HTML templates
- Style guide
Solution
We revitalised the look, enhanced the site architecture, and allowed the layout to be customised within a modular grid. The resulting enhancements to navigation, combined with a few other tweaks, meant the number of pages visited more than doubled: an impressive metric by any measure. Done in conjunction with New York sister company, Catalyst Group.
Concept
Benefit
- Gave About's web team a templated design that permitted constant manipulation of content and page elements in order to optimize traffic in real time.
- Provided a fresh but familiar visual design wrapper for the new architecture.
- Usability testing following About's re-architecture (conducted separately by About) indicated a high degree of user preference for the new "ubiquitous front door" strategy.
- People found it "clean" and "easier to look at."
- Improved About's core pageview numbers by approximately 100%.
- Improved About's pageviews in its highest-opportunity area, visits from search engines. Specifically, pageviews from Google visitors rose 30-40% following the implementation of the design.
< case 02 > Jeopardy Game
An alpha stage game for America's favorite quiz show.
