Brand and color blocks

NevadaToday is the University of Nevada, Reno's primary and most successful outreach tool. The current version of this site is a complete rebuild, built in-house, and launched in August 2019. The purpose of this rebuild was to develop a 100% accessible website by meeting or exceeding the Web Content Accessibility Guidelines 2.0 (WCAG 2.0) standards.

As the lead UI/UX designer and frontend developer for NevadaToday, I was charged with increasing user engagement, readership, and audience reach.

First, to increase user engagement, I built several customized components to allow content publishers to include multimedia rich content. These included different article types that allowed publishers to add video, quotes, audio podcasts, or feature hero images in the header or top section of the article. These features were also built in such a way that they could be embedded into the article content body.

Second, to increase readership, more article options needed to be displayed on each page, including the home page. To meet this need, I built components with dynamically populated articles, based on the article category, to be pulled and displayed at the end of each article. These included, "More in -Category-", "Latest in -Category-", and Editor's Picks. Once readers reach the end of a given article, a variety of different articles to read are presented to them.

Finally, to increase audience reach, social media sharing options were added as well as a new component to pull and display NevadaToday articles across the UNR.edu website.