Nicholson New York is revamping the New York Daily News' Web site to make it more user-friendly to visitors and more useful to the company and advertisers who want to know the people they're reaching.
As a precursor to the revamp, the agency put a survey up on the existing site in January that asked visitors about their demographics, location, interests and reading habits. From the results, the agency learned a great deal about the site's visitors and how they would like the site to look.
“We weren't too surprised to find out that many of the visitors are from outside New York. It's the way many people find out what's happening in the city,” said Michael Wexler, director of research and measurements at Nicholson New York.
The site at www.nydailynews.com will be launched at the end of June and will incorporate much of the visitors' input.
“We tried to look at things such as whether readers follow a certain columnist, and we found that other than a few celebrity columnists, people are more interested in following content and certain sections of the paper,” Wexler said. “We are making it more browsable, because that's how readers like to use it. The New York Daily News will have stories in categories and sections rather than on some sites where you see a single featured headline story.”
Although the agency is not working with New York Daily News' advertisers for this assignment, it tried to use the survey to capture the type of demographic and psychographic information that would be useful to advertisers.
The agency has built technology, such as cookie technology, into the new site to let the paper track visitors.
The technology will allow the company to build up profiles to tailor the Web page presentation to a reader's preferences. Because of its diverse visitor base, the New York Daily News has not yet decided what level of profiling would be appropriate to use.
The agency also installed programs that improve the ease and speed with which editors at the paper can put up stories on the site.
