Redbrick student newspaper site to get redesign

Redbrick, the University of Birmingham's award-winning student newspaper, is set to launch a redesigned website on Monday, almost a year to the day after launching its responsive site.

The redesigned website will have a bigger focus on personalisation, multimedia and campus-oriented content said editor Josh Holder, who has spent the last four months working on the changes.

"Once I was elected editor I thought it was a great chance to work on a redesign and really sharpen it up," Holder told Journalism.co.uk, "and hopefully make it one of the best student media websites out there."

Holder said new articles would include a profile picture of the author, a small bio and a link to social media to encourage involvement and remind readers the publication is student-operated. The University of Birmingham does not have a journalism department.

"If you're interested in what someone's saying you can follow them on twitter and really speak to the authors, that's a really nice thing that you can do with digital media that you can't do with print media quite so easily," said Holder.

"For student media it's really important as it hammers home the point that this is all student run. So if they have a little bio saying what else they're involved in, that they're an engineering student or whatever, it's nice."

New features on the home page include replacing the carousel with article previews that are colour-coded for the different sections; a 'campus spotlight' section to focus on campus art and culture; and a new area to showcase video content.


Image provided by Redbrick

"This has taken me the past four months of doing it evenings and weekends," Holder said. "We've got big plans for the next 12 months working with some of the other media groups at the university to make sure we've got a lot of multimedia content. We'll be constantly improving it and we'll have live blogs."

Redbrick will keep the responsive nature of its previous iteration and is now "optimised" for smartphone and tablet use, said Holder.

"We've spent a lot of time making sure it loads really quickly on mobile as 38 per cent of our traffic comes from mobile devices," he said. "Students are well known for having their smartphones and playing on them all day."

Redbrick won best website at the Guardian Student Media Awards in 2011, was runner-up in 2012, and has entered this year's awards.

Correction: This article has been updated to show that Redbrick has entered this year's Guardian Student Media Awards, not shortlisted for the awards. Shortlisted nominees are due to be announced in late September.

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