Re-architecturing Canada's most popular newspaper website was no simple matter. We wanted to not only clean up thestar.com, but give it new functionality to keep readers coming back: a difficult task in the competitive world of online news.
With the homepage being the most heavily trafficked, we wanted to give readers a way to view the news that met different reading patterns. While the standard view provides the most common formatting, filters like visual news used imagery as a primary mechanism, while a timeline view lets you parse stories based on their chronological order.
Another key feature of the site was the addition of Topics. These offer deep coverage of stories, people and places, by aggregating all related articles, media and background information on that subject. Topics help take readers beyond an individual article to get the full story.
Similarily in articles pages, we wanted to give readers easy access to all related materials. This involved creating navigation and modules that allowed quick access to photos, videos, comments, maps, and scoreboards to name only a few. We wanted editors to have these tools so they could continually add more value to articles, and to keep readers moving around the site.
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