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You know Rolling Stone. It’s the definitive voice in music, politics and culture. It’s a global icon.
Rolling Stone has been the backbone of entertainment news and culture for decades, yet their previous site did not reflect this. When we originally met with Gus Wenner and the Rolling Stone editorial team their website was lacking personality, organization and curation. We evaluated the brand and created a strategy to drive more traffic to their site, keep users on the site and design a new look and feel that more accurately represents the ethos of the company.
We found that the users who came to the homepage tended to be interested in one or two topics of interest. Since Rolling Stone has such a wide breadth of coverage we wanted to make it easier for users to find the content they were interested in most. The homepage is divided into sections of content that group articles and content by topic. Users can further personalize the homepage by hiding sections of content that they are not interested — helping them view the content that matters most to them easier.
Rolling Stone is well know for their reviews so we incorporated a reviews module into each section of the homepage. Users can quickly see the latest reviews at a glance and dive deeper into the review if they are interested.
Pre-roll video advertising is one of the largest growing and in demand advertising methods. The Rolling Stone team creates great video content but previously did not have a good solution to promote that content. We created a homepage module where the editors can curate the content and highlight their best content. Better exposure of their video content with pre-roll video advertisements increased profits for the Rolling Stone team.
Keeping users active and engaged on the site is important for the success of any website. On the article pages of Rolling Stone we included key areas to recirculate content. Users can see the most recent articles published by an author by hovering over the author byline. On the right side of the page we included an automated trending module which pulls in the most popular articles of the past week. This keeps content appearing in the module fresh and timely. Additionally, the editors have an area in the backend where they are able to curate a list of must read articles.
