E3 has been appointed by Associated Northcliffe Digital to redesign the entire ‘This Is’ network of web sites after a competitive 6-way pitch held at Northcliffe House in Kensington.

The project will see E3 develop a new design that will be rolled out across more than 45 sites. The brief also includes getting the agency to carry out an extensive review of site architecture and to develop a strategy around maximising user generated content across the whole network.

Robert Hardie, Managing Editor for Associated Northcliffe Digital, said: “We’ll be working with E3 to ensure we can capitalise on the sites’ very loyal and active user base. The ‘This is’ network delivers 50 million page views monthly and 2m+ unique users. Ten years after its initial launch and after so much organic growth it’s now time to review the whole network to ensure it can be even more successful going forward.”

Stuart Avery, E3’s Joint MD stated: “We’ll carry out fairly extensive user research and we’ll use this as the basis of the redesign. We’ve recently launched our own in house usability lab and we’ll utilise this to feed this research into our user centred design process. That way we can ensure we get the best possible result when we launch the site.”

He added: “We’ll be exploring the whole user experience including how visitors navigate their way around the site and how they search for content. Sites with this sheer amount of information must offer multiple paths to content to cater for different user preferences. We plan to investigate the use of web 2.0 approaches to enhancing the ‘findability’ of information such as user generated tagging and promoting stories based on ratings and comments as opposed to traditional editorial decisions.”

Robert Hardie concluded:

”We were looking to appoint a long term digital partner who could demonstrate their experience of tackling major web and IA projects of this kind, had successful case studies of developing sites containing user generated content and had an in depth understanding of the balance between editorial content and commercial content.

The project is expected to take six months to develop and will be launched in Spring 2008.