CNN.com revamps website

Posted by Jennifer Lush on October 26, 2009 at 12:04 PM

CNN.com has revamped its international website today with a greater focus on video and photography and less text clutter. The redesign comes as many news organisations, including the BBC, attempt to keep their homepages up-to-date with changing technologies, the advanced capabilities of the Internet and a general shift in the way people consume news today.

Speaking about the new presentation, Nick Wrenn, CNN's vice president for digital services said: "It's a design change that gives us a more contemporary look, with a new focus on video that brings the site to life."

The neater homepage is now divided into three simple columns: "The left hand column is the story of the day and underneath the user will find the daily headlines," said Wrenn. "Breaking news is our core brand and will continue to have a prominent spot. But we wanted to showcase a lot more of the deep, rich content we have. It was falling off the main page too quickly and people couldn't find it.

CNN's new page also places greater importance on both opinion and entertainment, a move Mercedes Bunz proposes might be the result of recently released ABC figures showing the Huffington Post had grown an astounding 67% in a year.

Bunz suggests that the success of Arianna Huffington's news/blog aggregation website, which produces a mix of entertainment and political news content, has prompted CNN to emphasise it's entertainment section. Wrenn told Bunz that CNN had pulled it's own positive figures in this area and that this was the motivation for the changes: "On the domestic US site, the entertainment section brought in September with 19m more page views than politics with 17m. And for CNN International we can speak of the same trend." None-the-less, the website does appear to be incorporating Huff-Po style celebrity columns with conservative journalist David Frum, social-networking expert Pete Cashmore, as well as the likes of actor John Leguizamo reported to be potential regular contributors.

To boost entertainment content, the CNN.com has begun content-sharing partnerships with Entertainment Weekly and People, and will reportedly launch an online game show, CNN Challenge, which will feature the networks top anchors such as Anderson Cooper and Larry King challenging contestants on news trivia.

Aside from a new entertainment focus, the website has developed it's personalisation functions. Users can now customise a column on the front page with sports scores or stock prices, local headlines or weather, and visitors to the website will also have more opportunities to participate in stories, with almost every page on the site opened up to comments.

CNN will also introduce language feeds in Spanish and Arabic, a move hoped to expand its core users from Europe, Asia and North America to include Africa, the Middle East and Latin America.

Source: Media Guardian, Media Week