New mobile optimised Scoop website launched

Wednesday, 10 May 2017, 5:22 am
Article: Scoop Publishing

Today Scoop Publishing Limited is launching a new Scoop.co.nz website design. It has been a long, long time in the making - and replaces a design originally launched in 2005 and modified in 2007.

The Scoop team is really excited about the new look and the next phase of Scoop’s development.

Top of mind for the present redevelopment was an improvement that has been requested by a sizeable portion of Scoop’s members and readers whenever we have sought feedback, mobile friendly design.

We are delighted that with this new Scoop website design, Scoop is now fully mobile device optimised.

The new website is the culmination of a huge effort by a lot of people, and we could not have got this far without your support.

We’d like to extend a special thank you to these generous financial supporters who have recognised the value Scoop’s unique mix of independent news, public interest journalism, commentary and analysis provide in the New Zealand media landscape.

Thank you also to our friends at Enspiral who helped professionally and financially towards the new website design. The design was enabled in part by Enspiral internal bucket crowdfunding contributions made by Enspiral members through the application co-budget. Enspiral also connected us to our amazing design team (below) and our new team member and tech lead Wiremu Demchick, who is working hard on this project and others to advance Scoop’ technology infrastructure.

Internally Wiremu and Steven Wood, Scoop’s Business Development manager, led the new design implementation and upgrade effort, ably advised and assisted by the rest of the team at Scoop.

We also want to extend a special thank you to designers Ian Loh and Shanshan Zhou who took our vision and created something we can all be proud of.

A new portal to a rich deep web of content

Over the last 18 years Scoop has built up many layers of navigation to its deep and rich web of news content, including images, video & audio. There are now over 800,000 pages in our core news database - all accessible via our faceted full text search engine. Each month we add another 40,000.

The website has gone through a number of iterations since it’s inception in June 1999. The circa 2007 version which predates our latest design has served over 100 million sessions over the past decade.

A lot has changed since 2007, most notably the invention of the smartphone, and the complexity of Scoop’s information ecosystem has evolved significantly too.

In coming months we will start work on user interface enhancements which we hope will provide ever improving ways to access our deep reserves of news content. It is exciting to think of the possibilities as we continue to pursue our mission to provide all Kiwis with both a place to be heard as well as easy access to clear, accurate, timely, broad news and information.

What have we done

The new Scoop site has stripped back several navigational layers, its colours and its classic, mid-noughties, looks.

We have introduced a new brighter colour palette that better represents the range of news from across the spectrum that Scoop publishes.

Designers Ian Loh and Shanshan Zhou:

“To reflect the new direction, we have given Scoop's iconic orange more brightness and warmth. The intention being to evoke the quality of clay and earth to support the idea of Scoop’s role as a Kaitiaki - warm, approachable, friendly & grounded. On the site, this orange will serve as a guide to highlight important pieces of information. And to improve readability, larger font sizes and more generous spacing have been used throughout.”

Primary site navigation has been simplified to a focus on the Front Page, which includes all the curated news stories and features by our Editorial team.

The old sections navigation - has been dropped from the top level, but the pages remain accessible by clicking on the headings of each front page block, and in the footer of each story page.

Our latest breaking news wires navigation- which has always been the most used method for browsing the site remains in the header, with links to the Politics, Parliament, Regional news, Business, Science and Technology, Culture, Education, Health news wires as well as to the latest Scoops - where you will find the reporting and commentary from Scoop’s team and contributors.

Above the wire navigation you will find links to several selected Scoop hosted subsites including Gordon Campbell, Werewolf, Wellington Scoop, Business Scoop and the Scoop Review of Books.

Mobile optimised

The site includes responsive design so it will resize to suit your desktop, laptop, surface, iPad, mobile - hopefully whatever device you prefer to use for news. We know this will be helpful to many readers as half of Scoop reader sessions are now via mobile devices.

The site is optimised for modern browsers like Safari and Chrome which are the two most popular in use for Scoop readers. However, with over 800,000 pages and so many possibilities for different device and browser configurations - if you do notice something that doesn’t look right for you please let us know by emailing tech@scoop.co.nz with a page link, and a screenshot if possible.

The new Scoop site also features our new and updated Scoop Independent News logo.

This new fully mobile main Scoop website is complemented by our lightning fast mobile version at m.scoop.co.nz which was launched earlier this year and will shortly come out of beta. Over coming months we hope to make all Scoop’s hosted subsites mobile friendly. Werewolf.co.nz and Wellington.scoop.co.nz were the first off the block in this effort.

Designers Ian Loh and Shanshan Zhou reflected on their work saying:

“It has been a pleasure to work alongside the team at Scoop, and we hope that we have done right by them and their readers. We have been amazed by the speedy turnaround, and our thanks goes out to the team for bringing our designs to fruition. We look forward to working together with Scoop and its readers to improve the site as we get more feedback.”

What’s next?

Scoop’s central focus this year is on completing its transformation to a sustainable - advertising free - business model. In this ever more turbulent media environment the effort we began in at the end of 2014 appears to have been well timed .

Scoop’s innovative Ethical Paywall model ensures Scoop remains open and accessible to the Public, something which we believe is vitally important to assist the health of democracy by ensuring that citizens can inform themselves via reliable comprehensive first source news material.

We all know it’s getting harder to find a decent news source these days.

Under our Ethical Paywall model organisations whose staff use Scoop in a professional capacity need to be accredited through purchasing an annual Scoop licence. Our annual licence prices are very reasonably priced to cover small, medium and large organisations.

We have big plans for the next phase of Scoop, and importantly expanding Scoop’s editorial team to cover and investigate more news stories that are important to the public of New Zealand.

Reaching sustainability will enable us to continue developing the Scoop team; and technology innovations, both at front and back end for the next 18 years and beyond.

- The Scoop Team, 10th May 2017

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