A High-Profile Website Redesign

Smerconish.com: An Unbiased News Source

The Smerconish.com team prides themselves on their unbiased, middle-of-the-road approach to delivering today’s top news stories. Each day, Michael Smerconish’s subscribers receive a newsletter with 20 hand-selected news articles from various independent sources about the latest political and social headlines.

The newsletter also invites subscribers to visit the Smerconish.com website to participate in a daily poll about relevant political issues. This poll attracts over ten thousand visitors every day.

Smerconish.com had grown so large that their existing website platform no longer met the team or the users’ needs. Realizing a full website overhaul was needed, Michael Smerconish sought an experienced website design agency. One of our previous clients referred him to our team, and our adventure together began.

Building An Integrated, UX-Friendly Website

The Smerconish.com team’s primary goal for their new website was an updated backend process. A streamlined site that improved the process of curating their daily newsletter was a must. Of course, our team needed to ensure user experience (UX) design best practices were followed along the way.

Our process from discovery through to launch included:

• Creating website style tiles that adhered to the client’s updated branding
• Building a custom website development solution that incorporated the daily newsletter and introduced a new “Smerch Merch” online shop
• Integrating Smerconish’s email marketing platform, ConstantContact, to help create more efficient daily processes
• Incorporating revenue-generating opportunities through 3rd party advertising partnerships
• Speaking to Michael Smerconish and his core team every day to keep the project moving forward on-schedule
• Upgrading the design of the newsletter to enhance their subscribers’ experience
• Conducting a competitor review and keyword analysis to ensure the website appears for relevant search queries
• Incorporating Google Analytics to stay on top of website performance and proactively identify and fix any errors
• Ensuring the website followed UX best practices and adhered to web accessibility guidelines

Since Smerconish.com is such a highly trafficked website, Creative MMS needed to push the redesigned website live during off-peak hours. Our Production team stayed up through the night and officially launched the website on October 5, 2022 at 2 AM.

But our work with Michael Smerconish and his amazing team is not finished. We’re continuously running tests and updating their team on our latest findings. We set up heatmapping on their site to understand and interpret how site visitors are interacting with different elements. We’ll continue to make strategic updates to the site based on feedback from their audience and by analyzing user behavior.

Creative MMS is immensely proud of all the hard work our teams put in to solve the Smerconish.com team’s biggest challenges. The overall response has been very positive so far. We look forward to continuing our partnership and growing their online presence to new heights.