Real Simple Relaunches Web Site

RealSimple.com to now offer daily content, original videos and blog postings.

By Chandra Johnson-Greene
Wednesday, February 25, 2009

With a slightly modified philosophy of “life made easier, every day,” Time Inc.’s Real Simple unveiled this week a redesigned Web site that showcases daily content, reworked channels, a library of original videos and blog postings.

The new RealSimple.com now features six channels—Food & Recipes, Home & Organizing, Beauty & Fashion, Holidays & Entertaining, Health and Work & Life—and its homepage now features “Today’s Tip,” valuable advice for users to “make life easier.” “Today’s Tip” is also offered as a newsletter and an RSS feed. The homepage now also highlights the site's blogging network, "Simply Stated," and its most recent blog posts.

“The objective of the redesign was to make RealSimple.com a daily destination for our users,” Tanya Singer, executive director, RealSimple.com, told AD. “We wanted to provide content that was unique to the Web and not just about the magazine content.”

Singer says that her staff did a lot of market research to understand both the magazine reader and the site user in order to find out what Real Simple customers really wanted out of their site experience. “We did a lot of quantitative and qualitative research and we looked at behavioral data as well as broader Web audience data to see what they were doing,” she says.

As a result, the channels were reworked based on where the traffic was going. “We broke Health out as its own new channel because it was really popular with our users,” Singer says. “So we augmented our health coverage with content from Health.com. We also moved a couple of other things around and optimized them for search based on how people were using the site.”

RealSimple.com is also launching with more than 100 original "How-To" videos featuring the brand's editors and covering a wide range of topics including, how to carve a turkey, how to fold a fitted sheet, how to apply eyeliner, and how to make a martini. The site features written, step-by-step instructions on the same page as the video so consumers can easily follow along. The staff has plans to add more "How-To" videos to the site in the coming months.

RealSimple.com has seen significant traffic growth recently with 17.6 million page views in January 2009 (up 35 percent over the 2008 monthly average) and 2.1 million unique visitors in January 2009 (up 19 percent over the 2008 monthly average.), according to Omniture.

Singer says that there are two main factors that RealSimple.com’s success could be attributed to—its partnerships with companies like CNN.com and MSN, and its six newsletters, which have a total of one million subscribers. “Our e-newsletter program is extremely popular with our Web users,” she says. “So we’re really excited about expanding it with the Daily Finds e-newsletter, which we launched with the site to go with our ‘life made easier’ theme. It’s sort of Real Simple’s version of Daily Candy.”

As far as what’s next for RealSimple.com, Singer hints that users will see a more personalized experience in the near future. “We don’t have a registered area of the site right now,” she says. “So that’s something we’re hoping to change. We want to see our readers connect more with each other and we want to be able to provide more personalized tools for our users.”