New look coming for the UK Telegraph

The UK Telegraph is close to showing off its redesign, which has been in planning for a good while.

Martin Stabe spells out the changes (and has a few images) over at PressGazette.co.uk.

The relaunch comes after a six-month user research and redesign process that was conducted in-house at Telegraph Labs, the company’s new research and development unit.

Like several other recent news website redesigns, Telegraph.co.uk will move to exclusively horizontal navigation, dispensing with vertical menus to increase the amount of space available for content above the fold.

The primary aim of the redesign was to increase user engagement with the site, said Roussel. The Telegraph currently publishes around 300,000 news stories online each year, and hopes to increase the volume of pages that each user sees.

UK users of Telegraph.co.uk currently access an average of 16 pages a month, and although Roussel there was no firm target, the aim was to increase that figure within the next year.

“In the next 12 months we hope to achieve a much deeper level of engagement so that for each person who comes to the site, they not only read our news and sport but see really the full gamut of content across the site,” he said.

I like the look of it very much. It looks clean and well organised. And while a number of page elements have moved, the Matt and Alex cartoons have remained, very sensibly, at top right. Matt is still the first thing I look at whenever I visit:)