Here it is – the future of a website redesign strategy – the marriage of three critical components: cloud services, social media and web content management (WCM). Take a look at Newsweek.com who recently launched a total site redesign incorporating these significant platforms to stay ahead of the pack while enticing visitors to come back for more. 

Perfect Case Study 

Newsweek.com proves an important and timely case study for any organization that is in the process of a site redesign or redeployment. Reason simply, websites will now require strong metrics reporting, easy maintenance and extensibility as well as monetization and social integration in order to flourish. Such is the case for Newsweek – a publication and media outlet that has been floundering in recent times.

“The technology allows the business to grow in ways that had been holding it back,” says Geoff Reiss, vice president and general manager of Newsweek Digital. He explains that Newsweek created amazing content over time, but because of the way it was published and organized, “less than 15 percent of that content was discoverable through organic search.” The relaunch of Newsweek.com meant the reintroduction of about 70,000 items of content that had effectively been lost to site visitors. 

The most popular articles at any given time aren’t from the vault, though-they’re stories, video and images linked to on social networks like Digg, Facebook and Twitter and on MSN. Reiss calls Newsweek.com a “peak-driven site. When we produce a piece of content that hits in the marketplace,” he says, “it really hits. We need to be able to serve hundreds of thousands of consumers an hour.” Moreover, traffic isn’t predictable or necessarily tied to events. 

Lastly, Newsweek Digital is using Amazon cloud services to accommodate surges in traffic caused by increased use of social technologies – a marriage made in heaven. 

Take a test drive of Newsweek.com ‘stories’ section and see how some of their strategy can help your organization. 

Source Excerpt:

Newsweek.com redesign fuelled by social media, Amazon cloud and WCM by ZDNet 

Best,

Denice MacDonald