Background
The Amherst Student is the oldest college newspaper in the nation, and has been reporting about the Amherst College community since 1868 but its digital presence remained an obstacle in reaching its audience. They had a dated website which wasn’t responsive making it difficult for our mobile audience to access content, and an unwieldy content management system which made editors unable to experiment with new designs, or more interactive elements.
As an avid reader of the paper, I was always irritated going to the website and sent an email over in early Spring 2017 complaining to the editors-in-chief. These conversations ended up led to me becoming the paper’s Digital Director with my first project - being rearchitecting our news website to support a better user experience for writers and editors, and transition our brand to a modern yet classic digital identity.
This would be the first of many projects spanning from our website, newsletters to managing a social media team but I’ll focus on website development.
Discovery
We began this road to rearchitecting the Student’s digital identity with a discovery stage where I focused purely on understanding this project by communicating with stakeholders on the history of the organization, and its digital presence, and their hopes and dreams of this new initiative.
Speaking to the Editors-in-Chief, I learned of the prior financial troubles of the organization, and hopes to re-become an independent newspaper. They viewed this project as a clear sign of their organizational transformation, and saw that it could possibly increase the impact the student newspaper had. The prior website was impossible to change and upgrade without outside technical support leaving them in a state where the site didn’t really feel like their own. This sentiment was felt with the section editors as well who just wanted to be able to add interactive elements in an article, and feel they were creating the look of their article, not the other way around.
“It’s ugly and looks old. Gets spammed constantly. Hard to search for past articles. Best content doesn’t appear at top. Photos are TINY. Stupid temperature thing. The link to the blog even though we haven’t had a blog update in years. A lot of weird blank space. Font is boring and looks old-fashioned. Color-scheme is gross. Info at bottom of comment section about text format — UNNECESSARY. Missing important info about the paper and masthead.”
Design Process
How do we extend our brand into a digital publication?
We were craving a new design for our website but the conversation became quite difficult as our prior website didn’t approach this conversation with intention, and as a result it felt more like a design of its time, rather than a timeless design. Coming from a print background, this was an extremely interesting question. So, I began this design process by collecting other news media organizations websites, and using Dropmark to pass it to the website’s standing committee to see where their vision lied.
I quickly learned I was a bit too fixated on making the Student look like a new media organization such as Vox, and the response was pretty clear with some of my favorite options being called:
“just think those are much more magaziney, while we are much more newspaper oriented.”
Development Thoughts
How do we create a publishing platform which is easy-to-use for the newsroom but also agile enough to support testing out new ideas?
My biggest priority was I wanted to ensure that our publishing pipeline would be open, simple to comprehend organization-wide and support agile development. Our prior website had a lot of opportunities but its technical architecture didn’t support continuous improvement rather forcing a one and done model. Additionally, it was written in PHP - a language most students at Amherst aren’t familiar with and I really wanted to utilize this project as a way to involve the tech community at Amherst.
Impact
- A 5x increase in readership
- 126,195 pageviews over eight months
- Other liberal arts colleges asking us about how our website works
- Dramatic increase in engagement with our website
- Community members and external relying on us for Amherst news
- Wider reach for investigative articles
- Increased coverage and sharing from our website
