Sky News launches new site design with 'visual content' focus

Sky News has launched a new site design which aims to give "a much greater focus on visual content" and easier navigation.

The redesign includes a new bespoke content management system (CMS) which has been in development for the past year. Executive producer for Sky News online John Jelley told Journalism.co.uk the new CMS will " enable our journalists to lay out that story in a way that's completely appropriate to the content that's contained".

Overall the redesign aims to give "a much greater focus on visual content", he added.

"We've got the top stories you expect to find but given it a much more visual flavour, so we can guide users to the most important video and images at the top of every story".

Users of the site can also "interact with interactive images, galleries, timelines and other video features in every story", he added.

"Rather than having to click off to lots of pages, when they come to a story they've got the full range of media and context there, right in front of them, that they can interact with.

"The idea really is to make a richer site, one that's easier to navigate and one that helps give all the analysis and background information users increasingly expect of a news site."

The new website sees the closure of the community profile pages and user blogs, which saw comments left across the site clustered in one place. Resources instead were dedicated to bringing "comments into the heart of the site", Jelley added.

"What we had on the old site was a little-visited and used selection of user profiles for some of those people who are leaving posts. We decided it was not a popular part of the site and that users would prefer if we developed our main commenting tools to allow Facebook integration so you can login via Facebook as well as using Sky ID to leave a comment.

"It's about bringing comments into the heart of the site so that it makes more sense for people looking at the stories that they can see all the comments there."

Sky News is currently in the process of integrating the iPad onto the same CMS system as the iPhone and website, which will allow journalists "to share all this rich media across platforms to get a really consistent user experience, whether on the phone, iPad or website", Jelley told Journalism.co.uk.

"The great thing about building it yourself, when it's bespoke, is that you can adapt it very quickly in the future, so as new devices come along you can really easily adapt the kind of content you want to serve to those platforms."

He added that in the future the site also plans to roll out on the website the ability to share more "units of content" socially such as picture galleries and interactive graphics, as well as stories and videos.

"People want to share more and more focused elements of content ... it's absolutely something we're working on at the moment."

Free daily newsletter

If you like our news and feature articles, you can sign up to receive our free daily (Mon-Fri) email newsletter (mobile friendly).