Today's Paper
For the Tampa Bay Times newspaper, the Today's Paper page was originally a repository for the day's headlines, repurposed into a delivery mechanism for the e-Newspaper.
You can review the live Today's Paper page here.The Problem
The Today's Paper page was a relic from the early days of the internet; a page on the site that existed because, "We've always had it and people expect it." It was initially designed to be a digital replication of the print newspaper, but that stopped making sense a decade earlier.
When the Tampa Bay Times reduced physical newspaper delivery days to only Wednesday and Sunday, a push was made to get people to subscribe to the e-Newspaper, a PDF of what would have been the printed physical newspaper.
A push was needed to convert users from print readers to digital readers.
The Solution
Revamp the Today' Paper page to highlight the availablility of the e-Newspaper while maintaining the expected functionality of lists of headlines representing the news stories of the day.
My Role
I first made several design mock-ups in Figma and reviewed those ideas with stakeholders. We went through several rounds of revisions until an agreeable design was reached.
With the approved design, I built the page in React Hooks and SASS in the ARC XP PageBuilder CMS.
My favorite part of the page (which is, admittedly, superfluous), is the faux browser inside the image of the laptop. The browser is mocked out entirely in CSS, and users can actually scroll the image of the newspaper within the "browser" window. The newspaper cover page image changes dynamically to match the day's paper.
The Result
With more deliberate messaging, the use of the page skyrocketed and digital subscriptions saw a considerable bump.
Many users prefer the simplicity of the "stack of headlines" to quickly browse the day's news.
The Today's Paper page became one of the highest-traffic pages on the site and has remained so with consistency.