Gripped Publishing is a Canadian sports magazine specialist with prestigious titles such as Canadian Cycling, Canadian Running, Gripped.com, and Triathlon Magazine. It had been several years since the last redesign of Canadian Running, and there were several goals for the new build.
Some of the goals were technical: using modern best practices to speed up the page loading, and improve ads and mobile performance.
Other challenges are just making the site attractive and easy to read with multiple ad placements.
Other goals were to make it easier for visitors to find new content, and to encourage longer visits, of course! The default layout for articles ditches the traditional sidebar. Articles are nicely centered in a narrow, easily readable format, that continuously loads related content as the user scrolls to the bottom.
The design process involved several meetings with the editors, followed by design mockups, using Adobe XD. This helped the team visualize how things would work with real content, before having to build out the code for the site. We went into BETA on a staging area and further ironed out things ad placements, and how the new layouts would behave. The end result was something that reflected the editor’s vision and makes for a better user experience.