product design | editorial strategy | rebrand
El Confidencial Home Page Redesign
For its 25th anniversary, El Confidencial rebuilt its home page from the ground up, alongside a full rebrand. As part of the design team, I helped move one of Spain's leading digital newspapers from a chaotic, section-based layout to a modular, topic-based design built for how people read today.
Key changes
Why a Redesign?
The project sat at the intersection of external pressure, business strategy, and editorial ambition, and it had to launch in time for the paper's 25th anniversary.
External pressure
- Google Discover changes in Europe began favoring individual creators and YouTubers over media outlets, cutting a major traffic source
- AI-powered search shrank the window for readers to reach us, raising the stakes on direct visits to the home page
- Like the rest of the industry, we were shifting toward a subscription model that depends on a direct, loyal reader relationship
Business goals
- Ship a fully responsive home page, since we were the only newspaper in our sector without one
- Widen the layout to 1200px to support the new ad formats competitors were already serving
- Protect ad viewability and revenue through the transition
Editorial goals
- Move from a section-based layout to a topic- and story-based architecture, like the NYT and Washington Post
- Break up the relentless hard-news feel with a more varied mix to attract different readers
- Integrate video and photography, and cut the excessive scroll that buried our best work
Balancing competing needs
The hardest part of the redesign wasn't any single screen. It was balancing what every team needed from one finite home page, under outside pressure from a shifting Google, while still serving the reader first.
Product design
A modern, coherent experience
Key needs
- A fully responsive, multi-device experience
- Greater prominence for photography
- Expanded support for video, particularly vertical
- A cleaner, modern design competitive with peers
Research
Template performance data
Click and engagement data across every home page template, used to identify what was working and what was being buried.
Competitive benchmark
Our benchmark board comparing how newspapers worldwide handle subscriptions, newsletters, opinion, live feeds, and video. [Add screenshot of benchmark board]
User interviews
User research sessions with readers seeking feedback on the new home page.
Survey results
Quantitative feedback on hierarchy, video, and the reading experience (survey items blurred to protect confidentiality).
Insights
Topics beat sections
Readers found the old mix of national and international news confusing, with the same section repeating at different depths. What landed was topic clustering, a story gathered in one place. People think in topics, not sections, which validated the core bet of the redesign.
Bylines drive subscriptions
For most readers, the columnists are the product, and bylines were the single most-cited reason they subscribe. Several wanted a proper opinion front with names and faces, Financial Times style. We treated opinion as a headline asset, not a footnote.
Opinion needs a predictable home
Readers wanted a fixed place for opinion so they always know where to find their columnists, yet also wanted day-relevant pieces to surface next to the story they respond to. Designing a stable home that still lets opinion rise with the news was one of the trickier balances.
Readers just want to read
Readers value a clean, calm reading experience over new features. What they pay for is independence, objectivity, and no clickbait, and several praised the 'sosiego' of a page that doesn't reshuffle every hour. Smoothness retains them more than any design trick.
Legibility is non-negotiable
With a largely older readership, legibility wasn't a nice-to-have. Readers flagged the gray entradillas as too light and the small bulleted 'píldoras' as too tiny. The new design read more clearly, though the gray tone is still on our list to fix.
Hierarchy from position, not photo size
Readers click the headline, not the photo, and read importance from a story's position far more than its image size. Big photos could even look like ads. So we drive hierarchy through placement and type, with photography supporting the order rather than setting it.
The personalization paradox
Readers say they don't want personalization, then in the same breath request it: hide sections they skip, local news by province, save-for-later. The data agrees, the one personalized module gets the most clicks by far. The challenge was never whether, only where.
Less appetite for video than expected
Appetite for video was low. Short vertical TikTok and reels-style clips were rejected almost unanimously, with produced investigation and explainer video the only exception. And since many read at work without sound, even good video often loses to text.
Smoothness beats tricks
Fewer pop-ups, a smoother login, a cleaner payment flow, and less intrusive ads retain more readers than any new feature. On mobile especially, readers said the advertising ate the screen. The base experience has to be excellent before anything clever sits on top.
Adapting to modern reading habits
The deeper question wasn't how to make the page prettier. It was whether organizing the news by section still made sense. We wanted the home page to adapt to how people read today: to attract new, loyal readers who would pay, and to improve the qualitative experience of reading on the site. That meant organizing content more by how people think naturally, around topics and relevant information, rather than around traditional sections, which are largely a holdover from print.
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A modular template system
Early on I proposed building the page from a small set of consistent, modular templates rather than bespoke layouts. Each template aligns an article vertically or horizontally, varies the image aspect ratio, and sits within a column-based grid, unified by a clear type hierarchy with distinct headings for each template. The goal was a system that was modular, versatile, and simple. Getting the balance of those three was the hard part.
Opening template
Banner
Topic and issue architecture
The new page is organized around issues rather than sections. Editors manually curate the opening and a sequence of issues, clusters of a lead story with supporting articles and context, followed by manually curated highlighted sections: economy, politics, international, and national, the topics our readers care about most. Below those, secondary sections like culture and sports populate automatically. Because issues aren't bound to a section, a big sports story can rise to the top as an issue and later drop back into its section, giving editors the agility to reorder, test, and eventually personalize modules.
Top to bottom
New homepage, new branding
The redesign launched alongside a full rebrand: a new logo, color system, and custom typeface, developed by an external consultancy.
Final result: Key changes
The new homepage was the culmination of over a year of work by employees at all levels of the company, not just from the design team, but from employees across almost every department of the company. Best of all, it arrived just in time for the 25th anniversary of the paper.
From sections to topics
A prominent band of "issues" groups articles by topic instead of section, letting editors rotate the most relevant stories into the top templates and give readers context around each one.
Opinion brought forward
Interviews showed opinion was a top driver of both new subscriptions and reader loyalty, so the new layout gives it more room: in the opening's right-hand column and in its own dedicated section.
Core sections still prominent: Economy, Politics, National, International
To keep longtime readers who come for specific sections, we kept the traditional ones below the issues and gave them weight with larger photos and more articles.
Soft sections given less weight (Culture, Sports, Lifestyle)
Sections less central to the paper's identity take up less height and fewer photos, cutting scroll. A standout story can still rise into an issue, and the rest populate automatically, reducing manual editing.
Space for vertical video and new formats
A priority was giving new formats, especially vertical video, a place on the home page. It lets us produce cross-channel pieces like interviews with our journalists, building a closer connection with readers and a sense of community.
Simplified modular templates
We pared back the templates and type system to bring order to the page while keeping a natural rhythm and hierarchy, so readers can tell at a glance how much each story matters.
Early signals
We A/B tested the new home page against the old one with a subset of users before launch. The early data was encouraging, with a few risks to watch.
Scroll depth improved significantly
Readers got meaningfully further down the new page than the old one. This addressed one of our core problems directly.
Click-through and time-on-page rose
Click-through edged up across many templates and time on page increased, suggesting a better qualitative experience.
Fewer articles, an SEO risk
The new page carries far fewer articles, and many of the ones cut were SEO pieces, raising a real question about Google discoverability that we'll watch closely.
Clearer and cleaner
In interviews, readers found the hierarchy clearer and the page cleaner and more legible, which matters for our older audience.
Confusion around the 'core'
Some readers questioned the 'core' section above the issues, asking why economy stories appeared there and again in the economy section below. It's a holdover from section-based thinking, and we may not use it often.
What we're watching
Post-launch we're tracking ad viewability, template click-through (especially secondary sections), SEO rankings, subscriptions, and direct reader feedback via a launch survey.