With Prospect’s ambitions growing and a new ambition to increase digital readership, 2023 saw significant investment into the website. This focused on moving the website onto a modern content management system and introduced new third parties to improve our ability to curate the editorial experience for users.

While an earlier redesign of the Prospect website focused on improving the visual appearance of the site on mobile and desktop (see below), this project was more technical. Moving from a WordPress environment to Glide, the new content management system, involved reorganising all content on the site to make it easier for users to explore and to optimise SEO to ensure Prospect stories appear higher in search results.

The previous version of the website also lacked the ability to test, learn and iterate when it came to promoting registration and subscription to users, reducing our ability to achieve the growth required. With this in mind, we partnered with Piano to integrate their user database and authentication solution with the site. I also redesigned and coded new templates to promote registration and subscription to users. Post-launch this has gone even further, putting the user at the centre of how we think about developing the website, as I removed frustrating pop-ups that interrupt a user’s experience of the site and replaced them with non-interruptive elements that allow us to show messaging to users on-site while putting their experience first.

The impact of this project has been very positive for the business, with users increasing 16% year-on-year (2023 vs 2022) and registrations increasing 24% year-on-year (2023 vs 2022).

Development of the website continues as we improve the overall experience for users interacting with everything from newsletter sign-up forms to voting for their World’s Top Thinker.