Showcase: Responsive Sites on WordPress.com VIP

Over the last 12 months here at WordPress.com VIP, we’ve seen a lot of innovative, smart redesigns from our clients. The majority of them have chosen to make their sites responsive, meaning that the site and content scales dynamically for desktop, mobile or tablet.

Today we thought we’d showcase some of these examples. Many of these sites are industry-leaders – being either the first responsive news site in their country, or in the case of TIME.com, the first global news site with a fully responsive design. Take a quick browse through this list. We’re very impressed – we hope you are too.

Global News | Built by our Featured Partner 10up

“The new GlobalNews.ca has been completely reinvented to maximize the user experience and make it as easy and intuitive as possible. Central to this philosophy is its use of responsive design technology, which will automatically scale GlobalNews.ca content to fit any screen size or resolution, creating a seamless experience on all browsers and platforms; be it PC, tablet or smartphone.” Read more.

GigaOM

“Our site — and the content on it — now adapts to whatever device you’re reading. The first phase of our site redesign, which went live today, also includes more curation, easier sharing and a crisper display.” Read more.

TIME.com

“On Monday, Oct. 22, TIME.com was the first global news site to roll out a fully responsive redesign optimized for mobile and tablet browsing. … Created by TIME.com design director Davina Anthony with input from the magazine’s design staff, the new look showcases the depth and breadth of their content, with more than 100 new articles, blog posts and photos produced each day.” Read more.

Metro (United Kingdom)

“We’ve unashamedly built this from a mobile-first point of view, sure in the knowledge that mobile users are making up an increasing proportion of our visitors – and will soon be in the majority. … With a flick of your finger you can now swipe or click through the top stories at that time, whether that be stories Metro’s editors think are important or those our users have shown they enjoy by liking, tweeting or reading. And this edition will keep changing throughout the day.” Read more.

Quartz

“Quartz is a website optimized for mobile phones and tablets. And as an HTML5 web app, it works seamlessly across a range of devices, from smartphones to desktop computers. It does not need to be downloaded from an app store and can be accessed simply by going to qz.com. … Quartz is free and built for social distribution: there are no pay walls, registration walls, or app store walls. The site’s radically simple, responsive design helps readers get essential information as quickly as possible.” Read more.

Variety

“The new website addresses years of requests from readers, with a site that’s easy to navigate and automatically configures material to platforms of various sizes and shapes, from large monitors to tablets to mobile devices. … Among the new features: An adaptive design for desktop, tablets and mobile phones; An expandable navigation bar that previews essential content from each site section; A new Video channel featuring news, events, trailers and interviews.” Read more.

The Dish | Built by our Featured Partner 10up

“The Daily Dish was founded in the summer of 2000 by Andrew Sullivan as one of the very first political blogs. … It has a readership of around 1.2 million unique visitors with an average of around 8 million pageviews a month from around the world. The Dish covers anything Andrew, the Dish team or the Dish readership finds interesting – from politics to religion and pop culture and art and film and poetry and philosophy and web humor.” Read more.

Metro (Canada)

“If you’re reading this on a mobile or tablet device, you’ve already noticed that metronews.ca is (we believe) the first national news site in Canada to employ a fully responsive design, meaning that no matter what size screen you view this page on, everything should be formatted nicely and properly.” Read more.

PandoDaily

“We’ve always had two goals we hold above anything else: respecting the readers’ time and respecting the readers’ intelligence. We do the latter with our original, frequently long-form journalism. We do the former with the PandoTicker. … We’ve made the ticker more app-like and dynamic in this version. It constantly updates and “new” flags call out when something is breaking.” Read more.

Black America Web | Built by our Featured Partner Oomph

“BlackAmericaWeb.com, launched in June 2001, is a broad-based effort to become a timely and credible source for news and information covering all aspects of daily life, featuring a wide array of viewpoints and perspectives.” Read more.

The Windsor Star

“The site was designed to make it easy for you to find the content you want. Our search bar scrolls down the page and our menu lets you search for stories based on topics — the courts, TrafficWatch, city hall — or geography. … Above all, the website was designed for our readers, who have told us they value local content above all and who have grown accustomed to reading breaking news on our website and coming back as those stories are updated and enhanced throughout the day. I stone cold love the new look and feel and I hope you will too.” Read more.

Skype Blogs | Built by our Featured Partner HumanMade

The Skype Blogs feature company updates such as new releases, feature updates, product education, and innovative use cases.

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Recent Launches on VIP: Global News, TIME 100, Wired TV

We’ve had a lot of fantastic sites debut on WordPress.com VIP lately. Here’s a quick look at some of our latest launches. Welcome to the WordPress family!

Last Monday was a big day, when we launched Global News, a Canadian broadcasting network. The site was developed by our Featured Partner 10up. Stay tuned for an in-depth post on this innovative new site.

This new TIME 100 site is fully responsive and encourages readers to “Cast your vote for the leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes that you think are the most influential people in the world.” Their polling system is powered by Polldaddy.

The brand new Wired TV site hosts a large database of videos which can be searched or filtered by channel, popularity or recency.

NI Group Ltd, the home of The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun, recently moved their corporate site onto WordPress.com VIP.

Pandora’s blog is a great place to discover new music, and to learn a little bit about their social media community through their embedded Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

Q&A: How National Post Liveblogs the News

Since launching our Liveblog add-on here at WordPress.com VIP, we’ve been impressed again and again by how fully the National Post newsroom has embraced the tool as a way to cover live events and breaking news.

They’ve used Liveblog to cover everything, from the Grammy Awards, to Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, to the Newtown shooting, to Stephen Harper tweeting his entire day. And the results are visually stunning, with a heavy emphasis on story telling through photographs, videos, tweets, commentary, and even gifs.

We chatted with James Martin, Digital Managing Editor, to learn more about how they integrated Liveblog into their newsroom, how they prepare for big live events, and what his favorite Liveblog has been to date.

How does National Post use Liveblog?

I like to use the Liveblog for entertainment and award shows. It’s great for displaying art [videos and tweets] really quickly and efficiently. Rather than us doing picture galleries as we might have done in the past, this gives us the opportunity to do a live picture gallery as things are unfolding. When I talk to my staff about what I want, I tell them to think about including commentary, video, gifs, tweets with the pictures – the Liveblog is an easier way for us to tell a moving story.

How did you train your team on using Liveblog?

To be honest with you, it didn’t take very long to train anybody on it here. It took us about 5 minutes to learn how to use it.

The training process was me getting it implemented on one of our WordPress sites, playing with it for about 5 minutes and testing its functionality. Once I felt like we had a good grasp, I asked one of my staff members to make a 2-3 page guide with screen grabs on how to embed a picture, tweet, YouTube, along with our Liveblog style guide.

National Post’s Liveblogs are rich with pictures, videos, commentary – how does your team plan for Liveblogs?

Too many cooks can spoil a Liveblog unless there is a specific plan. We have very specific roles for people. For example, during the awards shows, one person will be tackling the winners and nominations, making sure the winner graphic goes in. We obviously have those prepared in advance by our graphics editor.

We will also have one or two people (depending on resources) for color. One person will specifically be looking for tweets that value adds on any trends we spot. We’ve also had our style columnist, Nathalie Atkinson, providing fashion commentary at the events.

For the Newtown, CT shootings, there wasn’t any time to prepare. How did your newsroom assemble a Liveblog for that?

For Newtown, we were running stories rapidly throughout the day. Our editors were trying to use their news judgment and a bit of crystal ball gazing – we just didn’t know if this was the type of thing that would work well with a Liveblog. We made the decision to start the Liveblog in probably 15 minutes, after the first reports came through.

At that stage, we were very new to the tool, and there was some learning on the run. But the way it worked best was having one person on the Liveblog, and our other journalists providing news copy to the traditional file. But, there was a lot of overlap. The person on the Liveblog was finding and discovering things, and sharing that information with the news file, and vice versa.

How has your audience responded to the Liveblogs?

The best way of answering that question is to simply look at the type of numbers we get from the Liveblogs. Straight away, the analytics told us that not only are people reading it, but they’re staying on the page a long time and the engagement is high. And, we’re seeing them come back later. That’s the best feedback.

We recently had a big snow event in Toronto. In those situations, people are making split second decisions – can I send my kids to school? Are the busses running? We started that Liveblog at 5 a.m., with quick wraps of what schools are closed, what public services are closed, that’s what people want to read. That information is not always best served in a traditional news file, since shelf life of that information could only be a couple of hours. That weather Liveblog was easily our most read story for the day.

What’s your favorite Liveblog that the National Post has done so far?

In terms of raw news, I was very proud at the way in which we were able to use the Liveblog on the Newtown shooting. In terms of being able to get actual valuable news to the reader, I was not only really amazed at how efficient the tool was at getting information across, but by how our team was able to respond to the event, and funnel what information was needed to be given to the reader quickly.

In terms of showbiz, glitz and gam, any of our showbiz awards blog are great examples of what we do here — we don’t just give people words. The Liveblog really has become an amazing interactive experience with so many dimensions to it. The latest example with The Oscars is probably the best showbiz blog we’ve done.

Not familiar with how the WordPress.com VIP Liveblog Plugin works? Take a look at this video. It’s super easy, featuring content insertion from the front-end of the site, and drag-and-drop image uploads.

The Liveblog Add-On is $500 USD per month, with an annual subscription, for VIP SaaS Hosting clients. This includes unlimited liveblogs, and an unlimited number of users visiting, viewing, and receiving updates — all powered by our massive WordPress.com cloud infrastructure. If you’re interested in using the LiveBlog plugin or learning more, please get in touch.

 

Two Cities, Two Launches: #MadeInNYC & #WhereTheWorldChanges

There is no greater rivalry than #TeamNYC vs. #TeamSanFran. Both cities have launched high-profile initiatives to highlight their technology and startup communities and while they’ll continue to angle for prominence in this all-important race to the top, there is one thing that they share… Both of their websites, Where The World Changes and WeAreMadeInNY are built on one of our newest products, WordPress.com Enterprise. Check them out and while you’re at it, check out WordPress.com Enterprise and we’ll even hook you up with a 1-month free trial. You can find out more here:

Where The World Changes

WeAreMadeInNY

 

New on WordPress.com VIP: The Dish

Andrew Sullivan’s The Dish announced last year that they were going independent, and now they’ve successfully launched their new site on WordPress.com VIP with the help of our Featured Partners, 10up and TinyPass.

The new site created by 10up is beautiful and fast, featuring responsive design and infinite scroll. Using TinyPass, readers can purchase a subscription (or make a donation) to The Dish, or simply log in if they are already a paid subscriber.

A big thank you to The Dish team as well as 10up and TinyPass, who helped make the entire site migration and launch happen in just four short weeks.

Check out The Dish at http://dish.andrewsullivan.com/

Interested in going VIP? Get in touch.

Recent Mobile Launches on WordPress.com VIP

We’ve been really impressed with the mobile sites that have launched on VIP recently, many of which are responsive websites. Here’s a quick roundup of recent mobile launches on WordPress.com VIP.

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Quartz

Quartz’s fully responsive theme is blindingly fast, and scales whether you’re looking at it on a phone, tablet or laptop. The site looks and feels like an application. You can read more about Quartz’s innovative design here and here.

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LocalTV

LocalTV’s mobile app (available in both the iTunes and Android stores), is powered by a custom mobile theme that is wrapped into an app. It also receives “rich” push notifications, meaning they can push HTML updates.

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Time.com’s Person of the Year

TIME.com’s Person of the Year site was launched in just two weeks using a responsive theme.

Our Q&A with TIME.com Managing Editor Cathy Sharick

Time.com’s responsive redesign announcement

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GigaOM

GigaOM’s clean site is also responsive, and is easy to navigate on a mobile phone with a slide out menu on the left for sections and on the right for search and social tools.

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Metro

Metro’s site is fully responsive, with the added functionality of being able to swipe from one article to the next when on a touchscreen device.

Read more about Metro’s mobile-first redesign

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The Vivant

TheVivant.com’s mobile site takes advantage of beautiful slideshows that pop up inside of your mobile browser and allow you to swipe through pages that have both large photographs and in-depth captions. It is a child theme of WPtouch.

Read more about the new StyleCaster.com

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NeilLeifer.com

The translating the beautiful photography site of Neil Leifer onto a mobile device can be tricky. On this beautiful site, each gallery is represented by a thumbnail: tap once to see the name of the gallery, tap twice to load the gallery.

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Williams

Williams recently updated their site with a responsive design, which re-orients their homepage carousel from horizontal in the desktop version to vertical in a mobile version, and adds mobile-friendly navigation.

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Radar Online

The mobile version of Radar Online provides the full Radar experience, complete with slideshows, videos, commenting and social media tools.

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Naked Security

Using a child theme of WPtouch, Sophos’ Naked Security blog loads lighting fast, and offers mobile-friendly drop down menus.

Neil Leifer on WordPress.com VIP

You may not recognize the name, but you’ve seen his photos.

Neil Leifer, iconic staff photographer for Sports Illustrated, Time, and LIFE magazines (and one of Matt’s favourite photographers), now has a beautiful new home on WordPress.com VIP.

Here’s a snippet from Neil’s bio:

Leifer eventually became a staff photographer for Sports Illustrated before leaving in 1978 to become a staffer for Time magazine. In 1988 he was made a contributing photographer at LIFE magazine and spent the next two years dividing his time between Time and LIFE. When Leifer left Time Inc. in 1990, his photographs had appeared on over 200 Sports Illustrated, Time, and People covers—at that point, the most ever published of one photographer’s work in Time Inc. history.

Want to see his most memorable photos? Head on over to http://neilleifer.com.

Getty Images launches blog on WordPress

Famous stock photography agency, Getty Images, has launched its blog on WordPress! The design of course displays the beautiful photos Getty has in its collection to their best advantage and the site highlights content aimed at the Getty Images communities around photography, technology, and music.

Visit the Getty Images blog.

Are you an agency or publisher using WordPress? We want to hear from you.

Want WordPress for your site? Get in touch.

Metro UK migrates to WordPress!

A hearty welcome to Metro.co.uk, home of the UK’s 3rd most-read national newspaper! The site migrated over from a custom CMS into WordPress.com VIP Hosting. The site was also given a design refresh and their mobile experience was created from the ground-up so that readers with any device will get a fluid experience. Pull out your device, and give the site a swipe to move through continually updated stories and images.

Read Metro.co.uk’s announcement about the revamped website running right here on WordPress.com VIP Hosting. Visit Metro.co.uk.

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

Los Angeles Times Media Kit on WordPress

The LA Times has just launched a site from their Media Group, Media Kit, aimed towards advertisers. The site, running on WordPress, walks potential advertisers through the process of gathering information and planning an advertisement with the Los Angeles Times.

The LA Times also has two blogs on WordPress.com VIP – their popular Framework and Hero Complex sites.

[Visit the LA Times Media Kit site]

Are you a media outlet or publisher using WordPress? We want to hear from you.

Want WordPress for your site? Get in touch.