Hearst Relaunches Cosmopolitan.com

Redesign brings interactive features, tools and videos to the forefront.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Wednesday, June 24, 2009

Hearst Magazines Digital Media announced this week the relaunch of Cosmopolitan.com, which will integrate the previous site’s most popular features with interactive tools, video content and gift guides.

The new site features a new navigation bar with drop-down menus that constantly update links based on what is most important and include pictures for featured stories, “The Right Rail,” which appears throughout the site and gives users access to all of the site’s interactive features, and “Hot Right Now” links that will take readers directly to the most popular stories and features.

The site will also feature a promo player that can be seen on the home page as well as on the channel pages. It will give users a peek at the newest content and allow them to scroll and then click through to those features.

“Our new site includes everything people loved about the original Cosmopolitan.com and updates it with a fresh, bold, magazine-inspired look,” John Searles, editorial brand director, Cosmopolitan, said in a statement. “Plus the new functionality and design make it easier than ever for users to find relevant, original content and interact with other people who are passionate about Cosmo.”

Searles told AD that the new features on Cosmopolitan.com were inspired by customer surveys and emails as well as how traffic flowed across the site. “Customers told us they wanted daily freebies and more horoscopes, so now both are more prominently displayed and offered on the homepage,” he says. “We also realized that users were having trouble finding our videos unless we were actively promoting them, so the Right Rail was created to solve that issue.”

The daily freebies, Searles added, will also hopefully increase the amount of online subscriptions. “Our freebies have always came with a sub offer," he says. "Now that they we have daily freebies, there will be more sub offers out there.”

(According to the company, Hearst Magazines, as a whole, has sold 2.2 million net paid subs online in 2008; One in four magazine subs that Hearst sells comes from online.)

The redesign has also been a way to further promote Cosmopolitan.com’s original content. “We started doing a lot more original content on the site last year, but we found that the way the site was there wasn’t a place to highlight that,” Searle says. “Now, if you look at the homepage, there are so many more places to promote content.”