FT.com revamps with five homepages

This follows the launch last week of FT Alphaville’s long Room and record traffic on FT.com driven by an increased demand for accurate, independent and authoritative news and analysis on global businesses and politics.

The new look and feel is consistent with the Financial Times brand with clean, uncluttered and pink pages, focusing on quality of content.

The new design, which will be rolled out through the website into 2009, is one of a series of improvements and new features that will appear over the next six months, marking the next stage in the FT’s digital development.

Lionel Barber, Editor of the Financial Times, said: “FT.com allows us to reach an even wider global audience and is an increasingly powerful channel that offers our readers a new expression of FT journalism. The new design and improvements to FT.com further strengthen our position as a modern news organisation.”   

The FT is encouraging users to give feedback on the new designs and pages as they roll out through a new Editors’ Blog which is designed to give readers an insight into the FT’s journalism and how the website and newspaper is produced: http://blogs.ft.com/editors/

New features of the redesigned homepage include:

·         The five available homepages including a new Middle East homepage that reflects the launch of the newspaper Middle East edition in April this year

·         A Top Ten must read stories of the moment - breaking down the division between news, comment and multimedia on particular areas of the site

·         A Financial Times masthead with pink background that reflects the FT brand identity

·         A rationalised and horizontal navigation for the main sections of the site with drop down menus for sub sections

·         A new Markets Data module and quicker access to Portfolio tools to monitor investments

·         Greater story packaging with links denoting major issues explored in depth on the site

·         A ‘most popular’ list that lets users see at a glance what everyone else is reading and benefit from the collective intelligence of FT readers

·         Quick links to Tools for keeping up to date with news, including daily email briefings, RSS feeds and keyword alerts.

Rob Grimshaw, Managing Director of FT.com said: “FT.com’s ongoing development is key to driving the FT’s digital evolution. The redesign of FT.com gives us an opportunity to build on the success of our award winning access model that has now attracted 800,000 registered users and record traffic. We have seen double our normal traffic through the recent credit crisis.”