The redevelopment of the news.com.au homepage has been designed to evolve the brand into the next decade with plans to roll out continued updates across the site over the next six months, according to publisher News Corp Australia.
News.com.au general manager Melissa Overman explained: “Today we launch a refreshed news.com.au desktop homepage as part of an ongoing product evolution program. The improved user experience provides readers with a new simplified, clean and wide screen format. The page has been built to improve performance and support increased consumer browser habits on larger format screens. It looks great and importantly has been created to offer a premium and more immersive reader experience, which will in turn lift engagement on the site.
“Growing market demands on viewability means we need to deliver inventory of the highest value to our clients. The new homepage includes adhesive, position one, ad formats, which achieve 80% or more in viewability metrics, along with streamlined ad formats. We’ve boosted support for our native product with additional placements to drive audience growth for News Native Networks content.
“With consumer behaviour changing, in terms of people wanting to go directly to the source versus the sideways trend of consumption, we felt that it was the right time to enhance the site for our consumers and advertisers.”
News.com.au editor-in-chief Kate de Brito added: “News.com.au has been the number one news website in Australia for 39 consecutive months. We have maintained this leadership position by catering to our readers’ huge appetite for breaking news, politics, entertainment, finance and lifestyle content. A third of our readers come directly to the news.com.au homepage multiple times a day, making news.com.au a habitual, must-read destination for more than 9.8 million readers every month. To continue to evolve to meet the needs of our audience, this homepage refresh is the next step in helping our readers find the news they want, when they want it.”
Following an extensive program of work, News DNA’s product and UX teams invested months gathering data, extracting insights and examining the local and global market. New widescreen designs were rigorously beta tested by homepage editors and consumers.
Feedback from the millions of Australians who use news.com.au every month helped to deliver an intuitive consumer experience. Consumers responded positively to the premium design, liked the evolved advertising placements and felt that the content discoverability had improved significantly.
The new news.com.au homepage includes:
• A new simplified, clean and wide screen format.
• New content layout, larger images and a centre aligned logo.
• Improved user experience with improved content discoverability and faster load times.