Background

The Drum, published by the Carnyx Group, is the leading journal for the Design, Advertising and other Marketing Industries outside of London. The magazine has been running for over 21 years, reporting creative industry news with commentary and feature articles, and is run on a traditional advertising and subscription based model.

Line were appointed to redesign and develop The Drum's website following being acknowledged by the magazine as Digital Agency of the Year at their 2007 DADI Awards.

What we did

The former Drum website had proven difficult to maintain and restrictive in cross-referencing content. We deployed our own CMS framework to facilitate content population, and introduced a new taxonomy system to aid usability and make possible new relational structures to increase the 'stickiness' of the site.

For budget and continuity reasons, we integrated the existing forums, Agency Directory, and Jobs advertising sections in to the new site, redesigning the front ends to make them easier to use and more in-keeping with the new site's layout.

The redesign focused on applying the magazine's existing offline style to an instantly accessible content structure. Internal site promotions and the plugging of Carnyx run industry events are included to increase visit length, making advertising on the site more attractive, especially for recruitment specialists.

Results

The site appears to have been well received by our industry peers. An investigation of comparable 4 week periods two weeks either side of the launch show that page views are up 75% on before, with the pages viewed per visit up by over 60%. This has led to an increase of a third in the average time spent on the site, and a reduction in the homepage bounce rate of exactly 30%.

Most impressively, and importantly for the potential of the site's revenue generation, page views in the jobs section have risen by almost 460%, and unique users have increased by 12.5%, mainly due to an increase of 14% in Google referrals due to better organic search engine optimisation.