• Reflect the important role of social media. The Most Popular box tells readers what stories others are reading. Our social strip at the bottom of the page goes a bit deeper, indicating which stories are popping on Facebook, Twitter, LinkedIn, and StumbleUpon. (We'll be adding more services as our analytics permit.)
• Give more of our on-staff writers regular presence. Our new Writers module promotes the latest posts from a fuller range of journalists on our team.
• Create a higher-impact experience for advertisers. For both the edit and sales teams, clutter is the enemy. To cut down on the noise and give the ads more impact, we reduced the number of spots on our home page from a banner and two boxes to one box and one high-impact pushdown unit. In some circumstances, the page features only one standard ad. At the same time, we built in flexibility to test new native promotions that will allow us to surface custom advertiser content, labeled as such.
• Promote our sister sites better. Since early 2010, we have added a new site to The Atlantic portfolio (The Atlantic Cities) and to our parent Atlantic Media Company portfolio (Quartz). With the new home page, we're allocating space, when editorially appropriate, to teasing stories from those sites, as well as creating a footer that features top stories from all our sites at all times.
It's been a week since we introduced our new home page. In the coming months, we'll be altering article and channel landing pages to reflect the new look out front. Of course, even then we won't be done. In a constantly changing media environment where data and reader comments are both instantaneous, you're never done.
This post also appears at Folio, where Cohn writes a bimonthly column.
The goals we set out to accomplish, listed below, are hardly unique to The Atlantic. But familiar growing pains are not necessarily any easier to soothe. We tried, quite deliberately, to use the design process to fix problems and improve user experience. The mission included:
• Give the home page more visual oomph. We went with a larger lead photo and lead headline, and allocated more real estate to promoting our visual features, "In Focus" (our photo section) and video. We also adopted new typefaces and a cleaner look. I may sound confused; I just said a few paragraphs ago that the mission of the project was strategic, not aesthetic. That's true, but one strategic goal was to flex some visual muscle - to reflect the more visual nature of the site, to keep pace with other sites that publish much larger home page photos than we do even now, and to ensure the focus of the page didn't shift too far toward ever-more sophisticated and visually emphatic ads.
• Drive readers to the interior pages of the site. Six months ago, I wrote in this space that the home page matters, "but not, perhaps, for the reasons you may think." The argument was that the home page is critical for conveying the sensibility and values of a site, for serving as a statement of the brand. So the page mattered even if it wasn't triggering very many clicks, at least relative to social and search. True, but why not optimize the page (and all our pages) to drive depth? With the new design, we have introduced skyboxes on all pages as well as what we call the Belt on the second screen of the home page. Now we're promoting 18 stories on the first screen and a half, compared to 11 before. To our eyes, at least, the page doesn't seem busier.