Entertainment Theme

Entertainment Theme

Background

Many of the markets own multiple local TV channels and run multiple stations on one team. It’s important for all of the content to live in the same system to easily cross promote and share content. The backend is still on the NewsPublish CMS, but the theme would layout the content differently.

Design Features

This custom theme was designed for entertainment news pages and sub-sites. The layout features large media and image focus for stories with less text and for less serious topics. With less content and advertising, there is less competition with the larger images and video that users are seeking on an entertainment site.

The starkest contrast is the background featuring simple dark colors without the typical news graphic elements seen on the news sites.

Users and Research

This layout has less advertising opportunities in place of more sponsorship inventory since the users of these sites are a younger demographic than the traditional news sites. The traffic is also considerably lower than the traditional news sites.

We received input from various markets after looking into user behavior on our entertainment sites and listened to feedback from the editorial and marketing themes that desired a unique and younger experience. To better serve the content and audience, we removed as much of the focus as possible from the text and headlines. We also allowed for bolder, vivid colors to contrast the text in the hero.

Entertainment Story Pages

The design of the entertainment theme takes the large featured video from the investigative pages. This works great for a video focused platform with little to no writing involved. Even though the 300×250 ad is pushed down here with little incentive to scroll down, the added top right top sponsorship helps maintain revenue opportunities.

Related Content

The lack of large written stories created a new problem in this theme with a need for the widgets in the right rail. In order to fill up more of the space, I created a larger related content widget that matched the front page and used up the space left over and keep it balanced.

Metrics

After several months, we saw several markets take the opportunity to turn on the entertainment theme for their secondary sites targeted to the younger demographic. There has been only small increases in the unique visitors, but we have seen an increase in other KPI’s of content consumption and engagement. The focus on video helped to increase the time on site.