The Orange County Register
Creating a New
Online Presence.
To say it's been a tough couple of years for the newspaper business would be the media understatement of the century.
Newspapers everywhere are struggling to figure out ways to leverage their content— their intellectual property —and not their delivery mechanism, newsprint.
The Orange County Register website, www.ocregister.com is by far the most visited site in Orange County, California. The region is a top 20 market when split off from the LA DMA. The paper asked us to help them with a top-to-bottom reorganization of their web presence. 80% of site traffic was coming from other than the home page. This told us that the paper was not a trusted source of news, but rather a link on a search engine results page. Additionally, because of some cobbled together architecture and content management issues, the site could take up to 30 seconds to load.
HEILBrice performed exhaustive due diligence with a series of interviews and work sessions with all internal stakeholders, from editorial to marketing and sales. We also searched the globe for the best and most innovative examples of what content companies were doing. Our conclusion: The Register's goal should be to have a site facile and interesting enough to qualify to be the home page for everyone living in Orange County. The paper can't compete with global sources from a brand or content perspective on the big national and international stories. But importantly, it can completely dominate where it matters most: delivering relevant content for the neighborhoods that people live in. We call it hyper-local.
The resulting requirements, recommendations and front-end design includes an AJAX-enabled customization that encourages users to tailor the site to their individual liking. If you're a soccer mom, prep sports might be more important than the opinion section. If you're a developer, you are more interested in real estate and finance. The new ocregister.com allows customization and even the addition of RSS feeds from outside the site — a true portal. The architecture, design and html were delivered to the OCR development team for implementation in conjunction with a new content management system. Page views are up. Load time is down. Client satisfaction is high.