Rebuilding Vogue.com.au

The redevelopment of Vogue.com.au, the Australian Vogue site, began on 22nd November 2005, following several months of discussions about where the web site should head in the coming years.

The goals of the project were to:

• Simplify day-to-day maintenance of the site. This was achieved by introducing a Content Management System (CMS).
• Improve the user experience. The information architecture and visual design were both improved.
• Create a foundation on which to grow Vogue.com.au. This was provided by the CMS and architected by deploying the site across several domains.

Beyond these main goals, we also had to ensure that any old content that could not be brought over to the new CMS could still be delivered via Vogue.com.au.

Information Architecture

Site Structure

The first step in redesigning Vogue.com.au was to look at the existing site structure. In this analysis, we assessed where new content would be coming from (e.g. which existing sections were growing, and which new sections were coming online), and updated the structure accordingly.

In the past, the process of sourcing content for Vogue.com.au had faced several challenges, including:

• a lack of dedicated editorial staff
• copyright issues with existing content
• concerns about damaging the magazine by reproducing too much content for free

Without a recognised and regular content source, it's difficult to produce a site structure that is complete and doesn't make the site look empty. We also had to be mindful of how much space we had available on the navigation bar, so a finite number of sections had to be agreed upon.

The old site consisted of the following sections:

• Beauty
• Show Coverage
• Events
• Competitions
• Shopping
• Subscribe
• Forums
• Club Vogue
• Street Chic
• Titles

On the old site, the most actively updated sections were Show Coverage, Beauty, Competitions, Titles and Events.

Although Street Chic proved popular, it had been difficult to establish a regular flow of content to that section, given the work involved in finding quality participants.

Shopping was seen as an under-performing area, mainly due to our lack of resources to expand the section. We decided to address this later in the year.

The remaining sections, Forums, Club Vogue, and Subscribe, were seen as being key to the long-term growth of the site. Subscribe is the original revenue source for Vogue.com.au, Forums provided the backbone of the site's traffic, and Club Vogue provides the means to gather information and ensure constant communication with the site's audience.

The new site has all these sections, plus a new section called Fashion Central. To make way for Fashion Central the Street Chic section was merged with People + Parties. Combining it with content from Events will allow us to ensure that the Street Chic section won't appear stale.

As well as this consolidation, the Fashion section was expanded. Show Coverage became a sub-section of Fashion (although it still makes up the majority of the content), which gave us the opportunity to place more types of content into this section. For example, under the old structure, there was no natural place to put the recent "Gemma Ward's Backstage Diaries" content, and as a result it had been stored in the Titles section along with the issue in which the article appeared. Within the new site structure, the content can sit in a sub-section of Fashion and remain there indefinitely.

With these changes, the new site structure looks like this:

• Fashion (incorporating Show Coverage)
• Beauty
• People + Parties (incorporating Events and Street Chic)
• Fashion Central
• Competitions
• Shopping
• Forums
• Club Vogue
• In Vogue (incorporating Titles)
• Subscribe

This site structure was replicated on the CMS as a series of folders, and each folder was then assigned a template to determine the section's layout.

Archives

Under the old site, each section was fronted by a section index that featured the latest content, and had an archive that contained all content for that section.

With the expected increase in content on Vogue.com.au, the site's sections were expanded. The section index has the same purpose, but the new approach we took to structuring the archive has meant that the content is organized into a greater number of sub-sections. For example, the Articles sub-section of Beauty includes the categories of Makeup, Fragrance, Body and so on.

Specific templates are assigned to section indexes. Within sub-sections (e.g. beauty > articles), a "generic folder view" is used to display the contents of the folder. The generic folder view displays basic navigation, search, and a content listing. This allows users of the CMS to create new site sub-sections with just a few mouse clicks.

Content Structure

Under the old Vogue.com.au web site, all the content items were built as independent web pages, each of which had its own style information and markup. Very little data was shared between similar pages.

For the new Vogue.com.au site, the majority of content on the CMS was broken into "classes" from which "objects" can be built (these "objects" can be considered as the page you see online). Each class is associated with its own template -- or templates -- depending on which section is being viewed.

For example, there are many articles on Vogue.com.au (in Beauty, Fashion etc.). Each article is built as an "object" from an "article class". But if you view an article in the Beauty section, you'll notice that it has different formatting and design than an article categorised under Fashion. All that the people managing the site with the CMS have to worry about is a single generic article, as the web site knows how to display the information it is provided. Other classes include Event, Magazine Title and Slide Show.

Accounting for Legacy and Other Content?

In planning the site rebuild, we decided that it wasn't possible to have all content delivered via the CMS. Content that isn't controlled by the CMS includes Show Coverage, Competitions and Shopping. These areas of the site are controlled by independently managed systems, and the task of re-engineering that functionality would have taken us well beyond the project deadline.

The CMS we chose for the site was eZ publish, a PHP-based product that introduced an important restriction: the domain (Vogue.com.au) could not share CMS-managed and non-CMS-managed content. Therefore, content that is not uploaded into eZ publish will not appear on Vogue.com.au, and we weren't able to store traditional web pages in a sub-directory on the Vogue.com.au web server.

While it would have been possible to work around this restriction by installing eZ publish into a folder on the domain and including traditional web pages on that same domain, the Vogue.com.au redevelopment project was part of a larger project that aimed to control multiple web sites from a single installation of eZ Publish, so this potential workaround was ruled out.

The solution was to host non-CMS content on a sub-domain (e.g. http://showcoverage.vogue.com.au) and to create a "redirect" object that would point to non-CMS content. The redirect object contains many of the attributes for other classes on Vogue.com.au (e.g. Title, Description, Thumbnail), but the link to content is replaced with the location of the sub-domain.

New Section: Fashion Central

Fashion Central aims to become the leading resource for people who are looking for information on Australian fashion and beauty. The project was developed to address the company's lack of resources for producing content, and also to provide a service that would support the magazine by offering something that only new media can deliver.

Above: the evolution of Fashion Central from its initial proposal

Essentially, Fashion Central is a greatly enhanced version of the original site's "recommended web sites" page. It has been developed to hold two types of information:

1. profiles about people


2. information about companies

Sometimes, these items are linked together when there is a close relationship (e.g. linking a fashion designer to a fashion label), which effectively provides the user with a short-cut to related information.

This section of the web site will grow to become the foundation for every other section on Vogue.com.au. In six months' time, users will be able to view the latest Australian fashion shows, and if they like the designer's work, they'll be able to read about that person's history (in the associated Fashion Central profile) and find out where the label's stockists are located (via their Fashion Central fashion label information page).

New Section: Cover Archive - coming later in 2006

The Cover Archive is going to be a section of Vogue.com.au that allows users to view every cover (where possible) of the magazines Vogue Australia, Vogue Living, Vogue Entertaining + Travel, GQ Australia and Vogue Girl. The covers will be presented at a resolution that's high enough to allow users to read all the cover lines. For each magazine featured in the Cover Archive, a brief overview of the contents of that magazine will also be provided.

This was designed to be a section that we can add to on a regular basis, and requires minimal extra work once the full archive is established. When a new magazine is released, the information for the previous magazine is moved to the Cover Archive. The CMS automatically reformats that page so that it can be delivered via the Cover Archive -- there's no need for staff to add extra information or edit any of the document's details other than its location.

This was a similar project to Fashion Central in that it has been developed to overcome content production problems, and provides extra support for the rest of the web site. When an article is sourced from a previous issue of Vogue Australia, a link will be provided to the overview of that issue in the Cover Archive. The long-term plan is to link all references to past issues to that magazine's back issues section.