Flightglobal

Flightglobal homepage gets an upgrade

Thu, 23 Feb 2012 14:58:23 +0000

Today we've made some changes to the flightglobal.com home page and introduced a few additional page types, all designed to help visitors to flightglobal.com more easily access news and blog content.

Many of you have helpfully supplied feedback on the new-look flightglobal since we redesigned last year.

As a result we've been busy re-platforming some critical areas of the site in order to facilitate making rapid changes to layout and content.

The homepage is one of these areas and the initial improvements include:

A new full-width News Control exposing a whole bunch more news stories than were previously showcased. As well as the big sectors (aerospace, airlines, military, biz av), there are quick links to other news sector, the most read stories on flightglobal and the latest blog posts.
We've taken the opportunity to move the large "skyscape" image and social media links down to the bottom of the page. Although we really liked this as a dramatic design feature, many of you felt that this space could be better used or had thought it was an advert (which it wasn't!).
The Careers Control now features training courses, and quick search boxes for both jobs and training courses.
We've reintroduced the Question of the Week poll back onto the homepage, which many of you have been asking for.
We've also created a series of news listing and rss pages, in light of the feedback saying that some visitors to the site preferred viewing stories in list format rather than the browse-focused news channel pages.

There are a bunch of other tweaks and changes, and we'll continue to introduce them as we focus on tidying up and simplifying the rest of the page with a view to making it a little less blocky and busy.

So thanks for all the feedback and for persevering while we build in enhancements to the new site. Keep it coming.

New Blogs page now live on Flightglobal

Mon, 06 Feb 2012 16:37:56 +0000

Today we've upgraded our popular Blogs page with a tidier and up-to-date design.

The new page leads with the latest blog post from the portfolio of Flightglobal blogs.

We've also featured the weekly editorial "comment" from Flight International magazine (also know as the opinion leader column).

This is hosted on Murdo Morrison's Flight International Editor's Blog and is also published in the front of the magazine each week, and offers the "Flight International take" on topical industry matters.

The rest of the page includes all the popular blog-type links and lists, such as the full blog portfolio (from FlightBlogger to the Green Wing), all the latest posts, comments, tweets, social media links, and the top user blogs from contributors on the AirSpace forums.

Flightglobal is live ... and now the bugs

Tue, 27 Sep 2011 10:44:53 +0000

So we're finally live with the new flightglobal.com and with Flightglobal Pro (our paid-for subscriber service).

Thanks for your patience over the last 24 hours or so while we work our way through the inevitable bugs and stability issues that go hand in hand with a code release of this magnitude.

The new site is the culmination of over 12 months of development work, and far longer in terms of planning.

Here's a check list for hot topics at the moment:

People experiencing bugs should email details to: webmaster@flightglobal.com
People wanting to give general feedback on the new site should email me: Michael.targett@flightglobal.com. However it's probably worth reading this post about some of our changes first.
A few people have contacted me to say that they miss viewing news articles in a simple list format. This experience is still available on Flightglobal but is part of our Flightglobal Pro package. To take a free instant trial of Pro please go here, select which service you'd like to trial and follow the signs to Free Taster
And finally, we've made some changes to our article categorization system so, while we're going through and checking the various news channels, if you spot any oddities (e.g. a military news article appearing in the Airlines channel) email them through to webmaster@flightglobal.com and we'll correct the issue.

The new-look Flightglobal - a design perspective

Wed, 24 Aug 2011 10:40:00 +0000

Website relaunches and redesigns often polarize regular site visitors - "why did you change it?!!", "I don't like that one single bit", or "that looks so much better," "thank you for finally fixing that".

These are all common responses in the days following a major change.

So it may be of interest to fans of Flightglobal to provide some backdrop to the redesign elements of the relaunched site.

The driving need for a major change was that the old version of the site (dating back from 2005) was designed for a previous era of websites (and browsers / devices).

It hails back to the day when flightglobal.com's primary function was to deliver news and jobs for free to its visitors.

Since then Flightglobal has added many new areas and layers to the site, e.g. community areas, historic archive, video, social media, and now premium data and research channels.

These additions have been bolted onto the old navigation and pages templates one after another until the site's structure and user experience has begun to creak under the tangle.

Today's relaunch has given us the opportunity to reorganize the "information architecture" as well as tackle many of the usability issues that have developed over the years.

Users of other popular multimedia websites will see where we have borrowed best practice.

The bbc.co.uk for example, is one of the leading examples of a site that serves a lot of different types of users trying to achieve many different activities (e.g. news, weather, tv programmes, radio listings, iplayer, games etc ...) all under one url.

Elements of the main bbc home page have influenced our own global home page as we look to surface the raft of different activities visitors to flightglobal.com are trying to achieve.

We also wanted to bring back an element of magazine style to the website, which is something the previous generation of websites often sacrificed at the expense of functionality and search engine optimisation.

Today's software and technology facilitates the reintroduction of design features that help visitors enjoy their time on the site as well as find what they're looking for quickly.

The most obvious hat tip towards design cool is our home page "skyscape". For launch we have one skyscape and one aircraft silhouette but with subsequent development the skyscape will alter depending on the time of day and the aircraft silhouette will be drawn from a selection of different aircraft.

Elsewhere on the site, our cleaner-looking news channels are in tune with the current best practice design, meaning the whole news browsing experience is more comfortable and more enjoyable.

These include: article text size has been increased, intrusive advertising has been scaled back, hyperlink colours are more obvious, slick carousel controls expose more news content without using up more space, blog and video content is now displayed alongside traditional news content, and the list goes on.

Our navigation features an integrated crumb trail (also seen on the guardian.co.uk) helping to reduce the vertical size of our header and deliver colour orientation cues for site visitors.

We've rolled out a new "universal footer", acting as a mini sitemap, which should mean that wherever you are on the site you can get to your intended destination within a click or two.

Failing that, there's even an "All channels" page accessible via the "More" navigation tab that features a full and comprehensive list of pages and places on flightglobal.com.

A finally note on feedback. Fundamentally, we're trying to make flightglobal.com as user friendly as possible.

If you feel strongly about something we've done or haven't done - no matter how small - then please let us know. If we don't know about it, we can't fix it.

New look Blogs index page

Tue, 01 Dec 2009 16:12:45 +0000

Must be something in the air, as we've got a few new bits and pieces to talk about on Flightglobal this week.

Yesterday we updated our Blogs page - which use to simply list all the Flightglobal bloggers on the payroll, plus the latest posts.

The new-look Blogs (and Social Media) page continues to feature all our expert Flightglobal blogs and posts, but in addition we've added a bunch of extra goodies for blog fans to enjoy.

We have a new tab for our excellent collection of AirSpace bloggers. This growing portfolio of bloggers from the community of AirSpace members covers various different subjects, angles and indeed continents.

If you'd like to start a blog on AirSpace and be featured on this tab then let our Community Editor Stuart Clarke (aka Maverick on AirSpace) know.

Then there's a tab for the latest comments added to the Flightglobal blogs.
Obviously blogs are a two-way medium and all comments (as long as they're not offensive) are welcome and discussed in the Flightglobal Offices. We currently average around 200+ comments a week on our blogs with most of them being of an extremely high quality.

Lastly, there's a tab for Twitter. This lists the Twitter handles of Flightglobal staffers, our sector-specific Twitter accounts, and also our current Twitter favs from the world of Aerospace and Aviation.

New video page helps showcase the best and most interesting aviation videos on the internet

Mon, 02 Feb 2009 13:22:08 +0000

Good news everyone.

We've got a new video page on the wider format page design. Included on the new page there's an updated large format player with tabbed sections filtering the video content. We're hoping that should make browsing through Flightglobal videos a more enjoyable experience.

One thing we're keen to emphasis is that our Video channel is not just for the clips and films that our journalists gather and generate. We're encouraging users to upload their own favourite clips and to aid the process Disco Stu has prepared a video tutorial.

We also aim to aggregate the best and most interesting of aviation videos elsewhere on the internet to ensure our users don't miss out on such gems as cow hit by biplane and the tipsy nipper. Class!

Phew ... all blogs now redesigned. What's next?

Wed, 06 Aug 2008 14:03:50 +0000

I'm glad to report that all of the Flight blogs have now made it onto our new look stylesheets.

The last of them were completed yesterday with this blog, the Flight Blog (which used to be called Flight Intnerational) and Airline Business all getting the same treatment.

On this blog I'll shortly be getting stuck into to making the most of the new widget panels (the columns on the left and right) to better highlight key Flightglobal features and content.

Meanwhile as the redesign bandwagon rolls on keep and eye out for an overhaul of the Archives, Jobs and Shop which are all imminent.

The shiny new-look Flightglobal is live (and actually it's indigo not purple!)

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 21:59:50 +0000

So the shiny new-look Flightglobal is live (with only a small number of bugs!).

Thanks for all your nice emails - all very well received.

Just a few housekeeping messages:

The Shop hit a couple of snags but should relaunch tomorrow with the universal header/footer
Look out for the new "Discuss this article" feature at the bottom of every story. Following that link takes you into the AirSpace discussion forums to participate in a discussion around that particular article that you came from.
We have more goodies to come for next week, including a great Farnborough package and some really cool new pages which pull in related content from all over FG and the web and serve it back in a smart-looking format. We're calling them "dynamic landing pages".
And yes - my blog is yet to go onto the new design. I'm promised it's coming soon!

Don't Panic! This is still the same website

Thu, 10 Jul 2008 11:52:36 +0000

Just a word of warning, today should (fingers crossed) see the delivery on a big change on Flightglobal.

One of the key elements in our journey towards a fully redesigned and architectured website is about to go live.

Today's changes include most notably a new look and feel, giving the site a more modern and fresher appearance.

Also at the same time we're introducing our universal header. This includes some horizontal navigation to Flight's primary online content (eg. stuff like our Premium Services, Archives, Images and Shop).

There's also a universal footer that serves much the same purpose, only for items such as Contact us and Subscriptions.

So if you're used to finding these items on the old left hand vertical navigation and suddenly can't, then chances are they've moved to either the header or footer.

Some elements on the site have already made this change to their design, such as our blogs. Other areas of the site are due to rollout the new features in the near future (this is known in the trade as an "iterative approach to development" which is basically online speak for "getting on with it").

Once the changes have gone live I'll post another update with some more information.

FlightBlogger gets a new look

Fri, 04 Jul 2008 10:43:02 +0000

FlightBlogger is the latest Flight Blog to get the redesign treatment along with our Universal Header and Footer.

And it's heartening to see it so well received.

Within 5 minutes of deploying the new look comments were being left in praise of the new design.

Learmount and the Universal Header (and footer)

Thu, 26 Jun 2008 11:30:47 +0000

We're more than a little pleased to have a new addition to our blog portfolio.

The eponymous blog is Learmount and its writer is Operations and Safety Editor David Learmount. David's extremely well known and respected in the industry and will be using his vast experience to help explore the key issues from his particular sector in aviation.

It's actually been a little while now since we've launched a new blog - prior to Learmount it was LeftField back in Feb.

The reason for this is not because David has been holding out of the rack for a record amount of time, quite the opposite. Rather it's that Learmount is the first blog to go live with our new look template.

Even more importantly it's the very first page to go live with our long (long long) awaited redesign.

And with a modern approach towards redesign we're rolling it out to the various parts of the site in stages, as and when we're ready to do so.

First will be the blogs, then the news channels and home page, plus a new shop, next comes jobs, then AirSpace and then to infinity and beyond ...

Probably the most significant element of the redesign at this stage is our "universal header".

This is the very top level of site navigation and functions (logo, search and login) and will be a universal feature across every part of Flightglobal.

We've also deployed the lesser cousins, the "universal footer" which contains navigation to the usual suspects such as T&C and Contact Us, as well as links to other Flight Services and subscriptions.

The universal elements have become a recent necessity, the urgency increasing through the explosive growth of the website over the last 12 months or so. Our rapid expansion added many different platforms, systems and interfaces to the website, such as blogs, AirSpace forums and our jobs service. Most of these varied significantly in look and feel and so contributed to "website disorientation", where visitors either get lost through inconsistent navigation or are simply ignorant of content's existence.

Hopefully this is first step to correcting that and also the first big step to delivering our mouth-watering redesign.

As ever, I welcome your feedback ... (email me or comments below)

Redesigning Flightglobal and user pools

Wed, 21 Nov 2007 16:16:34 +0000

Flightglobal is about to enter into an intense period of redesign and development.

The intention is to modernise the site, put it more into line with today’s user needs, and to tie all content areas together in a consistent, organised way.