You Don't Need a New Website. You Need to Know What Your Website Is For.

ProPublica just launched a redesign. They partnered with a branding studio, rethought their visual identity from the ground up, and built something meant to travel across every platform where their journalism lives. It's a serious, well-resourced project, and it shows.

I'm not here to critique it. I'm here to talk about what happens when smaller newsrooms see something like this and decide they need the same thing, but don't ask the same questions first.

The conversation I have over and over

An editor or executive director reaches out. They've been at their outlet for a few years. The site feels dated. Staff are embarrassed to share it. Donors have mentioned it. Someone on the board brought it up. They want a new website.

I ask what they want the new site to do differently. The answer is usually some version of "look better" or "be easier to navigate." Sometimes they mention wanting to grow their membership program. Sometimes they say they want to reach more readers in their community.

These are reasonable things to want. But none of them are a brief. They're symptoms. And if you start designing before you diagnose, you'll spend real money rebuilding something that has the same problems in a nicer package.

What ProPublica actually did

Read Tyson Evans' explanation of the redesign and you'll notice something. He doesn't lead with aesthetics. He leads with purpose. The old visual identity was "built for a different era." The new one is designed to travel, to be recognizable whether a reader finds ProPublica on Instagram, Apple News, or a direct visit. The structural changes are about showing readers the full picture of an investigation, not just the article itself.

That's a publication that knows what its site is for. The design follows from that clarity. For most small newsrooms, the clarity isn't there yet, and that's the real problem.

The questions that should come before any design decision

I work with community media organizations and local newsrooms. Most of my clients don't have a chief product officer or a branding studio on retainer. What they have is a small team, a constrained budget, and a site that's doing too many jobs badly. Before I ever talk about design with a new client, I push on a few things.

Who is actually coming to your site, and what are they trying to do when they get there? Most outlets have a rough sense of their traffic numbers but no real picture of intent. Are readers coming to browse? To follow a specific beat? To donate? To sign up for your newsletter? The answer shapes everything about how a site should be structured.

What does your site need to do for revenue? If membership is your model, your site has to do real conversion work. That means your membership ask can't live on a buried page. It means your best journalism has to be visible and credible enough to earn a reader's trust before you ask for money. A redesign that doesn't take this seriously isn't a redesign, it's a cosmetic update.

Where do your readers actually encounter your work? This is the ProPublica question, scaled down. If most of your audience finds you through Instagram or a weekly newsletter, your homepage is not the front door you think it is. That changes what the homepage needs to prioritize. It also means the identity you're projecting off-site matters as much as what's on the site itself.

What is broken right now that isn't a design problem? Slow load times, broken mobile layouts, a donation flow that loses people halfway through: these are infrastructure problems. Redesigning around them doesn't fix them. You have to name them separately.

The version of this you can actually afford

ProPublica's redesign is impressive because it's comprehensive. A full visual identity refresh, structural changes to how investigations are packaged, new prominence for translations and audio. That's what a well-funded newsroom with product staff can do.

If you're running a community outlet with two full-time staff and a part-time web person, that's not your project. Your project is smaller and more specific. It's fixing the three things on your current site that are actively costing you readers or revenue. It's making sure your membership page actually converts. It's cleaning up your mobile experience because that's where most of your audience is reading.

The strategic thinking ProPublica put into this redesign is available to any newsroom. The budget isn't. But the thinking is the more important part anyway. Know what your site is for. Build toward that. Everything else is detail.

If you're heading into a redesign conversation and you're not sure where to start, I'm happy to talk through it. That's exactly the kind of work I do at Rainsystems.