Marin Magazine Launches Site Redesign

On August 3, 2009, Marin Magazine launched a new look for its Website at marinmagazine.com. A Godengo client for some years, Marin's team decided they needed better functionality on the site as well as new design features. I spoke with Dan Jewett, Web Editor, to find out what spurred their decision to do a site make-over.

What goals did the team at Marin Magazine have in mind for the site's new design?

Our goals were to bring the site up to current standards and implement the changes in a single launch. We realized that the paradigm of what a magazine site should do has really changed since we first launched ours—this was our effort to get up to speed. The model of people going to a magazine site to read the issue had really evolved to people going to magazine sites for all kinds of social networking and opportunities to participate.

What new functionality did you add to the site with the redesign? Did you get rid of anything that was not working for you?

We didn't get rid of anything, just redirected focus. So the entire issue is still up there but now gets equal billing with all the other components we added to the home page such as a rotating snapshot gallery, flickr photo of the week from user submitted materials, top picks from our calendar, blogs (including staff blogs and guest bloggers like Tyler Florence), contests, teasers from our newsletters, videos and picklists to get you right into our Geobase resource guides (an area that generates a lot of traffic from outside searches). All this is right on our home page and it gives readers a reason to come back more than once a month when the new issue is posted.

I see there are some different font choices and other stylistic elements on the new site. Apart from aesthetic appeal, why did you make these sorts of changes on the new site? Are they reflected in the print publication as well?

Our main site backbone didn't change, so we put our effort into changing the homepage to draw attention to all the content we already had but felt was getting lost in the mix. We also added a brand new Wine Country page with many of these same elements and added Editors' Choice and Home + Design pages that just draw from existing content. Certain blogs, like Tyler's, also run in related areas (Tyler's blog runs in our dine/flavor section).

In addition we discovered that there are many fonts you can choose for your page. We never gave this much thought before but knew we wanted something sophisticated and fun and found a font that seemed to fit perfectly with our overall design.

Dan Jewett is Web Editor/Associate Editor at Marin Magazine.

Joel Gales Sullivan is a project manager at Godengo. If you have questions or comments regarding this article, please contact her at joel(at)godengo(dot)com.

Posted by Super on August 24, 2009 at 02:54 PM in General | Permalink

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