Online Journalism Review has an interview with Chris Mandra, executive producer of NPR Online. Mandra talks about the process of redesigning the site. At the start of the process, he described the site like this:
We hadn't done anything to the site in quite a while, and we felt that the decisions we were making were haphazard. We hadn't grown instantaneously and exponentially. Over five or six years we'd grown from having a gopher site to this site with eight hours of audio every day and an archive going back five or six years. It was just stumbling forward. We knew we had some of the best content in existence.
This should sound pretty familiar to many of you. We see lots of sites that have just grown up over the years to the point where they are these lumbering masses of content. NPR, working with a consultancy, started with the basics. They studied the users and used this data to build a much more successful site. Its a good place to start.
Posted by Karl
February 3, 2003 03:37 PM