W Magazine is relaunching it’s website. The site hasn’t been redesigned in a little more than two-and-a-half years, and the overhaul, done in collaboration with the luxury digital agency firm Sweden Unlimited, is aiming to raise its audience of a little more than a million monthly uniques.
The overhaul also includes a new mobile site, responsive to all devices, to capitalize on growing traffic coming from smartphones. Stefano Tonchi, W’s editor in chief, said the new site puts images over text. He looked at the sites of other fashion magazines and it seemed that navigation was driven by lists and “a lot of words.”
“What’s missing out there is a Web site that can make you dream,” Tonchi said. “We gave [the designers] this briefing of creating a visual network, something that resembles a refrigerator door in your house, where there [are] a lot of things that are interesting and one goes on top of the other. We wanted to create a landing page that is a collage of images.”
In contrast to other Condé Nast magazines, W’s entire issues will be available online for free, though features will make their way to the Web site in pieces, not all at once. Staffers will also be posting some pieces exclusively to the Web, updated throughout the day, appearing under various categories, like Fashion or People. W’s lengthy archives are partially online, and the magazine is continuously working on adding pieces.
