What is Economist.com for?
Building a website that works for both the user and the business
What is our website for? That sounds like an innocent question. But once you start exploring it, you feel like this:
We are in the process of redesigning our website. It’s in very early beta so if you are lucky you may see one of the new versions. It’s only visible to a tiny proportion of people who come to the site.
As part of the redesign process our product team has been thinking hard about what our website is for. We’ve realised that websites are a bit like dice — they have many faces but are still one useful thing.
One of those faces is, of course, an online newspaper filled with our journalism. The website is the easiest way to consume our articles, videos and podcasts in one place. It’s where people can sample the breadth of our content and experience The Economist’s view on the world.
However, more and more people are reading, watching and listening to our journalism beyond our own website or apps. News aggregators, social networks and chat apps, such as LINE, are increasingly important to us. They allow us to deliver our work to people who don’t know us yet.
Although these platforms carry our distributed content, they lead people back to our website. So Economist.com is still vital: it is the only place where we have maximum control over how people see our work, and so it’s our best shot at persuading them to subscribe to us.
Our website is, after all, a shop too. A significant proportion of visitors coming to our site simply want to buy or renew a subscription, or find out what offers we have available.
The website is also a trouble shooter. Visitors come for help with miscellaneous problems — everything from a print issue not landing on their doormat on time, or a failed app download. It’s vital that we get these people what they need as efficiently as possible.
Another job the website performs is to offer a very different way of being a part of The Economist’s world. If you have subscribed we don’t really mind how you read our articles— in print, using our apps, or online — but the internet gives our visitors the opportunity to go one step further than reading. We’re hoping that our redesign will allow people to understand the world as The Economist sees it, and to engage much more with our views and our long-established principle of critical thinking. Our fantastic Essays led much of early thinking of the new site, and give an indication of what is to come.
It will take some time for us to achieve this, but we think we are on the right path. The debates part of our site, relaunched last year, is a good start — but there is much more to do, both to improve this experience and the rest of the site.
Yet another function of the site is as a place for us to sell advertising space. Readers aren’t our only customers; advertisers have long paid us to get their products or brands in front of our readers. (That said, the independence of our journalism is the most important asset we have — and it has been strengthened with our recent ownership change.) But there are challenges in selling ads. The industry is undergoing a transformation: just look at how many people are using ad-blocking software . But it continues to be incredibly important for us as a business.
Finally, the website has to tell the world about our company. We have a huge website with a high SEO ranking, so if you want to work at The Economist, find our offices or learn about another company in the The Economist Group it’s likely you will find yourself on economist.com at some point. In the new site we’ve tried hard to simplify the navigation to make this as clear as possible — although it’s still a challenge! Here’s a sneak peak of that new section:
So what is Economist.com for? We need to balance all these priorities, which are sometimes complementary and occasionally competing, and ensure we have a site that is great for our readers and works for our business.
If you see the new site please do take the time to give feedback, and let us know what you think.
Robin Raven is vice president of product management at The Economist.
