'The new design is not just cosmetic' – Behind the scenes of The Drum's new-look website
The Drum is going through an exciting period of rapid growth. We’re producing more content than ever before, and we’re doing it in more diverse ways. Our reach is now truly worldwide with our digital audience extending across Europe, the US and Asia.
Nick Creed - Digital Director The Drum
Today's website launch marks the beginning of an exciting new phase in the evolution of The Drum. We’ve made a big investment in our flagship website and our new site will enable The Drum to keep growing, whilst remaining the leading news platform for the global marketing sector.
We need to reflect the rapidly changing media and marketing landscape and specifically what our users want. I think we've done that with the new design.
We carried out extensive user testing and through our experimentation and analysis we also learned we could do a lot better with discoverability. We wanted to make it easier for readers to find other content that would inform and a key part of what we have done is rearranging the information architecture. This simplified structure will enable our readers to more easily navigate and find our content.
The first thing you might notice about our site is that it’s faster – about four times faster than our previous site. We live in a mobile world with a need for speed and improved performance on thedrum.com has been baked into the project. Delivering our content as fast as we can is essential to improving site experience, especially as our mobile audience gets larger every month. Our fully responsive site will deliver an optimised experience across mobile, tablet and desktop devices.
Another thing you’ll notice about our new site is its updated clean design. Our editorial team produce fantastic content – whether it's news, feature-based, video or creative – and we have aimed to create the right environment and design for everything we do.
We worked closely with the great team at Monotype who advised and helped with font choices which are being introduced across our full product range. We really appreciate the time they spent with us.
Our redesign is not just cosmetic – we’ve updated our editorial pages for easier reading and deeper engagement. And we’ve given Creative Works a full makeover so the work can take centre stage and users can engage more fully.
Content is based on five categories which are easy to find from anywhere on the site. We hope this will provide greater ease of access to The Drum’s growing content offer, and a more enjoyable experience of reading, viewing and engaging with us.
The new site is based on a completely new front-end architecture using micro services. This more versatile environment will enable us to more easily scale different parts of our online services as demand requires and creates the foundation to develop future functionality. We now have more flexibility to respond to our users and our fast-changing industry.
The talented design and technical team here at The Drum have put their heart and soul into the new website. This is just the start of a journey to continue to improve it over the coming weeks and months so please watch out for more changes coming up. In the meantime we value your feedback – just complete the short survey here.
So far our new site has gone down well with our readers. We hope you like it too.
Nick Creed is co-founder and digital director of The Drum. Follow on Twitter @ncreed