TheHardTimes.net is an indepent satire blog that pokes fun at music, video games, and subculture. It acrues over 400 million visits annualy, and boasts a dedicated social media audience of nearly 800,000 followers.
As the brand and blog grew and expanded into new terrain, the original layout became cluttered with a mix of colour, visuals, and text competing for attention.
The pre-2017 version of TheHardtimes.net (click to enlarge)
We began by looking into what made high profile news sites stand out, as well as identifying and cataloging issues with the current site.
Created wireframes for mobile and desktop screen layouts to detail what the structure should look like.
Created high fidelity mockups to visualise the finished product and provide baseline for building the site.
Building off of an existing Wordpress theme we built the site in a dev environment and launched after thorough testing and prep.
Based on immediate feedback we made updates to include more thumbnails on the home page articles and filter out redundant articles on the home page. We also monitor Google Analytics to look for opportunities to optimize.
Hard Times homepage wireframe
Hard Times post page wireframe