Opinion

Welcome to Mumbrella’s new look. Please excuse the eight year delay

Mumbrella has finally joined the 21st century with the first redesign in the site's history. Founder and content director Tim Burrowes explains the long journey to Mumbrella's new look.

Nearly eight years ago, shortly before I published Mumbrella’s first post, I made a slight miscalculation.

“Let’s get it launched, then in a couple of weeks, I’ll ask a mate in a design agency to do us a proper logo,” I told my business partner Martin Lane.

“For now, I’ll knock something up in Word.”

So I did.

For some reason, I seized upon the typeface Tahoma.

By then, we’d decided to call the website Mumbrella (a shortening of the phrase “everything under the media and marketing umbrella”). So I differentiated the word by making it all caps, except for the two Ms to represent media and marketing.

Build in Word: The most amateur logo of all time?

Built in Microsoft Word: The most amateur logo of all time?

It was, after all, just a temporary measure.

And then we launched.

But the couple of weeks stretched slightly longer. Until today, in fact.

Initially I used a free WordPress template called The Journalist.

The first template Mumbrella was based on

The first template Mumbrella was based upon

Sadly, the Wayback Machine internet archive didn’t capture the first day of Mumbrella, so the earliest version I have is about nine days in.

As you’ll see below, it was pretty basic, although the editorial issues were already beginning to establish themselves: Nielsen battling to maintain its stranglehold; Seven’s Olympics coverage; whether the IAB was representing only the interests of the big end of town; why social media guru Laurel Papworth was full of it, and so on.

Mumbrella v1

Mumbrella’s first look: Based on a free WordPress template

Within a few weeks though, I borrowed a developer from the magazine whose offices I was camping in, and we knocked together a site. This version put together by Julien Perreard (who these days is in a big job in Cape Town) had three streams of content covering news, opinion and Dr Mumbo.

Again, the first days of that new look are gone from history  (don’t believe people who tell you the internet is forever). And the earliest Wayback Machine screenshot I can find it is five months into the site, in April 2009.

At that point, I was declaring it to be the month that Twitter went mainstream in Sydney, reporting on the ratings for a new TV series called Mad Men, reflecting how Ten was the worst performing media stock of the year, and discussing how Coles was doing better advertising than Woolies. And I was also making the spectacularly wrong prediction that News Ltd would take its newspapers free.

mumbrella april 2009

Mumbrella’s look from 2009 to 2016

But as you’ll see, it was basically the same website that until yesterday Mumbrella has continued to be.

We did come close to a big redesign once. In about 2011, I published a callout to the industry asking for help and had dozens of responses. For reasons I can’t recall now, we ended up going with a Brisbane agency which is long since defunct.

Initially, we tested their abilities by having them create a site for our new conference Mumbrella360. It was such a bad experience for both sides that neither of us ever spoke again of them redesigning the main site.

Meanwhile, I let it drift. It was a classic example of something that was always important but never quite urgent enough.

Generously, but incorrectly, people would from time-to-time praise me for our deliberately lo-fi design, where, they deduced, substance was being deliberately prioritised over style.

Along the way, in a bit of a panic when Google prepared to start penalising non-mobile sites, we threw together a mobile version. Which, as you probably know, sucks.

It would take a determined reader to even find the opinion or Dr Mumbo sections on our mobile site, and we don’t exactly make it easy to share content either.

To be honest, I’ve been surprised that for a publication of the communications industry, we haven’t had more criticism.

analytics april mobile desktop

It perhaps helps to explain why, according to Google Analytics, we still only get 35% of our traffic on mobile. (We get 60% on desktop and 5% on tablet.) Admittedly, this is up from 28% at the same time last year, but still suggests that our readers prefer our desktop experience.

Meanwhile, our sales team were hitting an issue. While the local market that knows and supports Mumbrella tended to overlook our design flaws, for those advertisers based overseas we were losing out to rivals whose better design was getting them across the line instead of us.

So this time, we decided to do it properly.

A final impetus was Tony Faure joining us for a day a week as a coach to myself and Martin on how we run the business.

A former boss of both Yahoo and ninemsn in Australia, ex-board member of Business Spectator and Crikey owner Private Media, and current chairman of Junkee Media (among other things), Tony’s involvement with Mumbrella was pretty much conditional on us actually sorting out the look of the website.

The thing I found hardest to figure out was the best place to start – and I clocked up a couple more false starts and missed deadlines.

I’ve had far more experience running magazine redesigns than I have websites. That’s a relatively straightforward process – you write a lengthy document, explaining the position of the magazine in its market, who its readers are, and giving intricate detail on what you want each section of the magazine to achieve.

Two or three designers then pitch some key pages of the magazine design and you go with the one you like best (if you also like their price).

And it’s fair to say that from what I’ve learned about this process, I would do it differently next time.

With a site redesign, we had a number of key decisions to make. Not least of which was whether to stick with WordPress as our platform.

In recent years our site management has been done by a Hervey Bay based agency called The Code Company, which is run by a WordPress savant called Ben May.

By an amazing coincidence, the point a few years back at which Ben took on the responsibility, and moved us over to BulletProof’s servers, was also the point at which the site stopped crashing whenever we had heavy traffic.

Seeing your site fall over and not being sure how long until it’s coming back up leaves one with a horrible sense of powerless. I actually just felt a twinge in my stomach as I remembered it.

So I’ve come to revere Ben and his team not least for achieving that apparently simple thing of us not falling over any more.

But with a site reboot, there are implications for both the back end and, to put it in terms that designers would hate, the front end.

And you’ve got to make both bits work.

Plus, we were in a hurry.

Eventually, the right person for that design was recommended to us – Vanessa Ackland, who’s recently worked on the likes of Junkee and Mamamia.

The challenge we gave Vanessa was a tough one.

Normally she’d have spent some time working on brand strategy – not least because of our multiple sister brands like CommsCon, The Source and Publish that we’d like to bring more closely into the Mumbrella family. We’re late in heeding Adam Ferrier’s advice that the best number of brands is one.

But against Vanessa’s advice we wanted to plough on and redesign the site first.

The plan was that cheesy black-and-white Mumbrella umbrella would disappear, and the new masthead would simply be the word Mumbrella in the font we chose.

But then Vanessa had a breakthrough. Looked at from above, an open umbrella looks a bit like a marketing wheel.

mumbrella logo wide final

 

Not only that, but it would give us the ability to create a logo in one set of colours, then adopt other colour sets for sister brands.

During that process, it dawned on us: this wasn’t going to be a simple redesign, but we were in fact now doing a full rebrand.

Which is what you’ll see over the coming 12 months as we gradually move all of our other conferences, directory, training and awards brands closer to Mumbrella. But those that are already launched, including June’s Mumbrella360 and Mumbrella Awards, July’s Mumbrella Sports Marketing Summit and September’s Publish conference will retain their existing branding.

Luckily for me, this rebrand coincided with the appointment of our first full time head of marketing in Danika Porter. She arrived late in the process, and got me out of trouble.

All those things associated with a rebrand – new business cards, email signatures, new media kits – have actually happened on time. And they wouldn’t have done if it was just down to me.

Well, I say on time.

A couple of launch dates came and went before we felt ready for our sales team to start taking it out to key clients. Martin (the money guy) and I (the content guy) argued a couple of times about what ad formats would work on the site for both readers and advertisers.

And even then, we didn’t quite get round to show it to everybody we would have wanted to before pushing the button. So to friends of Mumbrella who we didn’t get time to show it to ahead of pushing the button, my apologies.

But push the button we have now done.

As you’ll see, Tahoma is dead as our typeface.

Now Mumbrella’s headlines are in a font called Montserrat, while body copy in in a typeface called PT Serif.

But for our editorial team, the most important difference is that they now have more control over how we present our content to readers.

Under the previous design, everything appeared in strict chronological order. The only way of bringing something back up to the top, was to manually change the date or time of publishing.

This has become an increasingly big issue as size and expertise of our editorial team has grown. It can be frustrating to spend hours or days on an analytical piece, only to see it languishing in the side bar of the home page.

That said, it of course comes in a world where home pages are less important. Readers tend to drop in via social media or our daily email rather than the front door a lot of the time.

So we are no longer taking the chronological blog approach –  now the editorial team can curate the top items on the home page themselves.

And we’ve done a few things to make it easier to stumble on other items, including – on both desktop and mobile – scrolling seamlessly on to the next article.

And of course, the mobile and desktop experience are now much more similar.

In terms of the reaction to the site, we’re actually not expecting or hoping for plaudits other than hopefully a recognition that the new offering is an improvement. The brief to Vanessa and Ben has been to simply make the reading experience a better one than before. I think they’ve pulled that off.

We’ve deliberately not sought out any elements of design for the sake of it. There are no unnecessary bells and whistles. If the design quickly recedes into the background, then it has done its job very well indeed.

You may also notice that we’ve now got a couple of larger ad slots. Again, I hope we’ve found a balance between giving our advertisers a chance to do something with high impact and creativity, and it not being intrusive for the readers. As you’ll see if you’re on the desktop, you can close the big billboard ad at the top of the page if you don’t want it.

You will, I hope, give us your feedback. What usually happens with any radical redesign is that at first everybody hates it, and then quickly gets used to it. That’s broadly what I’m anticipating.

But of course I’d still like to know what you think, either in the comment thread here, or, as you’ll see from the temporary link at the very top of the page, you can also update us on your thoughts privately.

I promise it will take us less than eight years to act upon your feedback.

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