Gene Lu

Supermarket News

Role
Design, Strategy

Strategy
The site's main source of revenue comes from advertising and off/online subscriptions. To boost this source of revenue, ads were strategically placed throughout the site and were mostly above the fold (1024x768). Premium content was placed at the top and bottom of the page to attract as many users as possible.

Continued Strategy (post-launch) Part 1
About a year after the initial relaunch, I worked with the Supermarket News team to once again simplify the existing site. After analyzing a year's worth of web traffic patterns, we consolidated on content and content groupings. Supplementary content like the classified section and subscription pages were pushed to the bottom. A section called Supermarket Data was created to combine all the "Insights" and "Rankings" into one area. The original 5 column formatting was removed in favor of a 1 column layout to conform to the look of the "Latest News" section.

Image
Revisiting SN Home Page
Image
Supermarket News Home Page

Continued Strategy (post-launch) Part 2
Already an established leader in the food retailing market, SupermarketNews.com continues to push further ahead of it's competitors with the integration of video on the site. In order to showcase the new content, we minimized the Premium section at the top and added the "Featured Stories" section. This enables the site to display more key content above the fold without sacrificing much real estate for premium content. About midway down the page, the video section sits below the boom box ad, displaying more recent videos.

Getting more above the fold
Getting more above the fold

Other changes were also made to the header area of the site. The "Login" area was pulled out from the utility nav in the original design and now sits in the upper right corner. This change enables us to put more visual focus on attracting users to signing up for both premium content and subscriptions. It was also obvious that the login didn't belong in the utility nav group.

Supermarket News Footer Area
Supermarket News Footer Area

Minor changes were also made to the footer area of the site. We consolidated on the size of the first story along with getting rid of the web 2.0-ish badge. This helped to make the footer look less advertorial and more editorial. A last push to getting users to subscribe is also made in this area with a block dedicated to marketing materials. 

Visit SupermarketNews.com

 
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