Growing Business Verticals

CNET has quickly grown its seasonal commerce coverage, tentpole events and featured series content as well as rapidly expand into new business verticals such as personal finance and health + wellness. Reinventing these sections onsite with every addition became unwieldy. The solution — create a modular hub page flexible enough to service all needs.

• Site CNET.com
• Year 2019
• Role Design direction, design strategy, UI, UX

The Hub Page

With the birth of each content niche to CNET came the launch of a custom hub page, serving as a live directory for all its topically relevant articles. From a business perspective the content of these hubs mostly benefit SEO traffic. However, Product Marketing has much to gain by offering custom experiences.

Going out armed with a new experience strengthens the Product Marketing team's offerings when competing for an advertiser's campaign sponsorship. And to begin, the first few hubs created were heavily customized, but with the rapid expansion of verticals and sequential sponsorship opportunities came several issues along with it.

The Problem

Branding — The over customization of each vertical created a visual divergence from CNET — in some instances almost unrecognizable from the established CNET brand and ecosystem.

Maintenance — The resources required to create and maintain the growing number of custom experiences were becoming unmanageable from both Design and Engineering perspectives. Having products branched off from the design system and code base, there were constant breaks and required maintenance that made evolving the overall site increasingly difficult.

Velocity — As well, Product and Editorial's heavy reliance on Design and Engineering resources to produce more unique hub pages made it difficult to keep up with the velocity of the verticals expansion.

The Solution

The Wild West approach to creating new hubs was unsustainable, but we still needed to deliver unique experiences and at scale. To do this, Product and Design conducted a site-wide audit, identifying areas of overlap, areas that were underperforming and new areas that would be required moving forward. This helped to identify a handful of base components that would account for the majority of hub content demands, such as a hero graphic, tabbed navigation, hierarchal story stacks (primary, secondary, river), a card slider, etc.

From these components a modular framework was developed that empowered Editorial to rapidly create unique and on-brand hubs through the CMS with little to no reliance on Engineering or Product Design. Any given content configuration is supported through an endless array of component stacks.

Though flexible enough to insert the occasional customization, the majority of content needs have been covered by the base stack of components. Continue below to view examples where the modular hub has been effectively applied to a variety of content category types.

Seasonal Commerce

CNET's Gift Guides have been a big revenue generator for years with no signs of slowing down. To name a few: Mother's Day Gift Guide, Father's Day Gift Guide, Grads Gift Guide and most notable, the Holiday Gift Guide. Relatedly, there are Black Friday/Cyber Monday Deals. Working these handful of guides into the standardized hub format has greatly increase the speed and efficiency of production — two important qualities, especially in the Q4 season.

Tentpole Events

CNET is known for its coverage of annual tech industry events such as Apple Events, WWDC and Mobile World Congress. Most notable is CES in Las Vegas where they have a prominent booth on-site, presenting live coverage and panel discussions of the week-long event. Though standardized, the hub page still supports the flexibilty to be individually themed in coordination with all these tentpole events.

Feature Series

From culture and politics to space and beyond, CNET's award winning special feature coverage provides a platform for the Editorial staff's journalistic qualities. Many of these features are part of their own larger series, such as Welcome to Mars and Hacking the Apocalypse. The nature of these articles are to be truly engaging to the user, with many published in the longform format. The hub page gives those articles a worthy home with engaging hero graphics, large imagery and an introductory 'about' section.

Expansion Categories

CNET continues to grow its coverage on emerging tech such as 5G networks but has recently expanded outside of the traditional tech sector into new areas such as personal finance and health + wellness. With these also come expanded sponsorship opportunities. Having a hub page that can excite marketers and users alike through use of animated heros, thematic components and easily navigatable subsections have proven quite successful in landing major sponsorships.

Though all of these verticals serve very diverse business purposes and content coverage, coming to the realization that they all share commonality in hub page goals enabled us to step away from the exhaustive over-customizations and standardize on an effective modular framework.

Streamlining Commerce

Improving the purchasing decision experience and increasing commerce performance within best list pages.

Learn more