Tampa Bay Times Redesign
For the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, this was a complete and total rebuild of tampabay.com.
Back to front, every element of it was made anew.
The Problem
- The website was outdated in its design and functionality.
- The website performance was slow and bloated.
- The codebase was snarl of tech debt, kruft and generations of workarounds.
- A new CMS had been purchased.
The Solution
The Lift'n'Shift
The first step was to replicate the existing site in the new CMS—warts and all—as quickly as possible.
This was a weeks-long endeavor for a team of twelve. The team devised a system to determine the order in which things needed to be moved, along with a system that automatically delegated pages to the next available team member.
While the bulk of the team transfered HTML and CSS to new pages, a small segment worked on replicating the JavaScript functionality and connecting it to pages for the correct behavior.
The Redesign
After the "old site" had been implemented in the new CMS, a fresh redesign was initiated.
My Role
For the Lift'n'Shift, I was responsible for learning the new CMS by the Washington Post, as well as learning React. Nobody on the team was familiar with React, as the old CMS had nothing to do with it, so we all had to become experts immediately.
I took on my share of page replication, but when broken functionality was discovered, a team of three was responsible for solving the issue in the new environment. I was one of those three.
For the redesign, the visual design was generated by a team of designers in the newsroom. My responsibility was to translate those mock-ups into functional components that could be used in ARC.
The Result
After five months of extremely intense crunch, the Tampa Bay Times unveiled its new design.
The new design helped to improve readability, customer stickiness, ad placements. Pains were also taken to keep site speed as fast as possible while improving SEO and user accessibility.
These endeavors continued after launch; five months was not enough runway to achieve an ideal state. I continued to work on improvements throughout my time with the codebase.