VentureBeat Redesign

We are excited to announce the redesign of VentureBeat! While we are designers and inspiration junkies, we’re also very much entrepreneurially driven web geeks. So it’s no surprise that VentureBeat is among those of its kind in our feed reader, making the project that much more interesting. The VentureBeat team first reached out to us with a bit of a simple task, help update their website. However, what started out as a simple redesign quickly evolved into a much more complex project, more of a renovation than a redesign.

The goal was to accomplish the impossible; to completely re-architect, re-design and re-develop the publication from the ground up, within ten days! While “impossible” is typically a project red flag, we were certainly up for the challenge – we’ve become quite good at working with aggressive start-ups. The objective was to continue to use the WordPress platform as the CMS as well as to take the current category organization style of VentureBeat and evolve it into more of a multi-site sub-branded experience. This created a need for the design of a sub-branded experience for VentureBeat and it’s new suite of content properties; it also required much strategic thought on how to best technically accomplish the objective working within the limitations of WordPress along with the implications on the user-experience, search engine optimization and simple administrative maintenance for the staff. WordPress MU kept coming up in discussion as a possible solution, but in short there were just too many reasons why it was completely the wrong direction for the objective – so we went forward with a single good old traditional WordPress install.

As complex as the back-end strategy was becoming, the visual design was also a challenge – creativity is a tricky thing, especially when it lacks the luxury of time.  Designing a clean and elegant aesthetic for a content heavy publication highly dependent on advertising is a challenge in of itself. Luckily, experience was on our side. Alex and I, before starting nclud, worked together at a publishing company; where we, a team of four, uniquely redesigned over seventy publications within a year-and-a-half timeframe – knowing how to handle the beast was something we’ve become quite good at. Sub-brands off of the VentureBeat brand were also created for each of the new five content properties; all of which now live on their own sub-domain but are very much intimately connected to the VentureBeat parent. We sought out to quickly design an aesthetic that was clean and sleek but highly organized, without over-designing.

From re-thinking the information architecture, to visual design, to brand extensions to front-end development and back-end integration, customization, migration and deployment … we are happy to say that mission impossible was in fact accomplished successfully. It was a great experience working with Matt Marshall and the VentureBeat team on this exciting yet aggressive redesign!

Every project at nclud is typically a result of our collective collaboration, VentureBeat is no different. However, a special shout-out to Alex for leading the design effort, Mike on the front-end development and Dan with working miracles on the back-end.

Read more about our role with the VentureBeat redesign within our portfolio.