Problem: While the company continually worked to improve CA.com, it became clear that the site needed an overhaul to match user expectations.
Additionally, ads had grown in sophistication and the site was having trouble serving them properly. Moreover, the Top 25 Best Cigars content, the most popular section of the website, was running on WordPress, while the rest of the site was in Drupal.
Company: Cigar Aficionado
Project Date: 2018
Activities: Content Audit, Competitive Analysis, Gap Analysis, Content Model, Content Design, CMS Migration, UX Writing, Information Architecture, SEO
Solution: A redesign would solve the website’s visual design and hierarchal issues and give our development team the opportunity to implement a more robust ad-serving system. The Top 25 content could also be migrated to the same CMS as the rest of the website.
Process: To start, I conducted an analysis of our competitor’s websites to see how much of a content gap existed. While CA.com was still the more popular website covering the cigar industry, analytics showed that the brand had been ceding ground to other outlets that offered better videos and more detailed photographs. Competitor research also showed that CA.com could find more success with features that dove deep into a subject and news stories that could be scanned quickly.
Using this information, I created content models that communicated to our visual design team the need for larger images, more conspicuous related content modules and other elements that would boost readability.
I also worked with our editorial team to create a plan to increase the quality of our video content and met with our art team to explore improving our imagery. We built a series of templates that were used to create content that only lived on our social channels and acted as a driver to the main site.
Additionally, I did a deep dive into our site analytics to find out exactly what content needed to be eliminated or merged and then created a new site hierarchy. This included creating specific cigar brand hubs that collected news, ratings and other pertinent information from across the site to encourage fans to get the latest on their favorite brands.
These brand pages were accessed via our updated Cigar 101 channel. Site data demonstrated that we could improve our standing with 21- to 34-year-olds, a demographic that was comparatively younger than the magazine’s core readership. Research showed this group was more comfortable learning via digital media, and so we created shorter, more impactful videos and crafted our cigar-education content into posts that were more scannable.
Results: The visual design team did a fantastic job accommodating each department’s requests into a design that users enjoyed. The new website has been a success for users and in-house staff alike, as the advertising team is able to work with their clients without fear of technology hindering any sales, while the site’s analytics have also improved. More importantly, the development team did a great job building the site on a framework that can scale up as necessary without the need for a complete overhaul in the future.