Dezeen Launches Its First Full Website Redesign in a Decade
Dezeen, the architecture and design news website, has launched a redesigned site. It is the first major update in ten years, following a previous overhaul in 2016.
The site began in 2006, when Marcus Fairs started it as a basic blog on WordPress, a popular tool for building websites. He ran it from his spare room. Nearly two decades later, the publication has rebuilt its platform.
Dezeen's co-CEOs, Benedict Hobson and Wai Shin Li, explained the redesign in an article on Dezeen. The work was carried out with Made by On, a creative technology studio. The team rebuilt the front end, the part readers see, and the back end, the systems that run behind the scenes, from the ground up.
The publication also changed where its site lives. Hosting moved to The Positive Internet Company, whose server infrastructure runs on 100 per cent renewable energy. Dezeen also brought its search and recommendation tools in-house. Those features, which help readers find stories and suggest what to read next, previously ran on outside services. They now run on Dezeen's own systems.
The brand has been refreshed too. Designer Micha Weidmann updated Dezeen's brand guidelines, the rulebook that sets out colours and logos. The new colour schemes and logos apply across the company's sub-brands.
One more piece is still to come. The jobs website, dezeenjobs.com, is set to be updated in the weeks after the relaunch.
For regular visitors, the most obvious change is the new look. Behind it, the site now runs on new foundations, with its own search and recommendation systems and a different hosting provider.
