News Website Design

Save the Student run a very successful website, providing interesting and valuable content aimed at students. They approached web design London agency Plug & Play for a new blog website design as their existing website was a dated example of news website design. Their existing website had been built many years previously and was no longer on a stable platform. A new blog website design would help resolve this issue.

Our news website design team met with Save the Student, understanding what they disliked about their existing news website design and how this could be improved with a new blog website design. Initially, our team started by presenting wireframes of how the new website would look. This gave the Save the Student team an understanding of how users would move through the website and how the content on each page would flow.

Blog website design

Once the Save the Student team had approved the wireframes, our blog website design team then started designing the homepage. Save the Student loved the proposed blog website design and signed off the homepage for our team to start designing the internal pages. Our team ensured that the designs followed the latest best practice guidelines for successful news website design.

Our blog website design team handed over their designs to our web agency team, who then spent several months creating the website. Once their work was complete the new website design project began its final phase of quality assurance testing. Our QA Test Analysts review the website across a range of browsers and devices, ensuring that all users would be impressed and able to engage with Save the Student’s new blog website design.

The final stage in the process of this news website design project was to do a final data migration and then put the website live. Post launch, we had a week’s grace period with Save the Student, monitoring the website’s performance and ironing out any teething issues.

Save The Student

A mobile-first approach for a successful content platform

Save the Student is a highly successful blog with millions of visitors per month, generating revenue through affiliate links and advertising. Our brief was to develop a modern, mobile optimised, responsive website that improved their on-page search engine optimisation with structured microdata and schema. We delivered a platform on WordPress that was highly scalable, easy to manage and maintain, that would build on existing SEO positions and look great across all mobile devices.

Lead time:
6 Months
Target Type:
B2C
Demographic:
Students
Website Goal:
Generate Revenue
Services:
Web Design, Frontend Development, SEO
Save the Student homepage screenshot student finance article list screenshot of the mobile menu open Mobile view of an article
Scope
  • Custom Design
  • WordPress
  • Data Migration
  • Speed Optimisation
  • Digital Marketing Strategy
  • SEO Consultancy
Resource
  • 1x Digital Marketing Specialist
  • 1x Website Designer
  • 2x Front-End Programmers
  • 2x Back-End Programmers
  • 1x Project Manager
  • 1x Quality Assurance Tester
Full length screenshot of the save the student homepage

Engaging with students

The website had to bring their content to life, and needed to load quickly – especially on mobile devices that make up a large percentage of visitors.

For a publisher such as Save the Student, there’s huge value in the engagement of their readers. To increase their subscribed audience we introduced micro-interactions to increase newsletter subscriptions, as well as click-through affiliate links that create revenue.

Solution

It was important we didn’t alienate loyal readers with a significant visual shift, so our design team created a concept that remained in line with the existing Save the Student brand but with a modernised look and feel. The Save the Student purple is used throughout the website and is complimented by strong colours used to differentiate between each section.

View site

Viewing student houses: what to look for article
make money page with menu open

Mobile first

With over a million visitors per month, the majority of which are on mobile devices, ensuring that the website interactions and call to actions were optimised for mobile was integral to this project.

Search engine optimised

Save the Student have a huge online footprint with high Google rankings for very competitive search terms. We needed to make solid recommendations to ensure that we built on this previous success with minimal risk.

Data migration

With thousands of legacy articles data migration was the biggest risk in this project. Our development team started the project with an initial migration of data so they were working with real content. Over the months, Save the Student continued to update their current site with their articles as the new website came together. After several rounds of rigorous testing it was time to impose a content freeze on the live site, run a final data migration and put the site live.

 

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