Interweave was tasked with re-imagining, redesigning and redeveloping one of the largest news/publisher websites in Greece: the digital home of the largest in circulation free press publication in the country, AthensVoice.gr.
When we were first assigned this project, we knew we wouldn’t be happy with a simple redesign. That’s why, at a top line level, we wanted this to be the most innovative and functional website of its kind in all of Southern Europe. What we ended up with was a complete product rethink. From top to bottom, from the logo to the content, from the architecture to the design, from the development to the infrastructure – we left no stone unturned.
We created a living organism, a work that keeps evolving in ways dependent on the person “behind the wheel,” the administrator.
The site is built on a number of winning strategies: Starting with the logo, the website’s full visual identity was revisited to accommodate a new, fresher positioning, a revitalized personality for Athens Voice. A thorough study was made both on the architecture of the website and the classification of its content with the main focus put on the observation of user behavior. The study included user focus groups, one on one in-depth usability interviews, a lot (a lot!) of desk research and global best practices analysis, as well as questionnaires targeted to existing users to gauge their needs and figure out which parts of the old website they enjoyed the most.
We introduced new types of pages and content types, as well as new features and templates that organize information in a different way. We also managed to introduce many small tweaks and optimizations without completely changing the environment, preserving the feeling of familiarity for the user.
The old website was created on an outdated version of Drupal which could not be updated. To resolve this, we wrote scripts that would implement all the data copying and moving process from the old database to the new one, as the redesign demanded new content types and new fields to be created. Theming was also built from scratch, as the new design was radically different than the previous one. Most importantly, we executed the tricky of task of migrating the old website’s content and classified everything under the new layout.
The site had to be compatible with a wide array of devices and browsers (desktop and mobile/tablet) and have a quick, modern user experience. The challenge was to make everything compatible to everything without sacrificing functionality. Fun fact: the site was even tested on Windows XP!
This cover is dedicated to the new Athens Voice website. The inspiration behind it was our way of approaching the redesign and the methodology behind the functional and architectural design of the website. We started by setting and taking care of the user’s online experience on a simple article page and worked from there to the more complicated ones. To that end, we used the tiniest (yet so essential) graphic element, the menu icon, to create a composition that communicates a complete creation, starting from the single unit to the final summation of elements.