It’s April already! While news has been breaking and the world has been worlding, we’ve been busy designing and building new site features. Here’s a look at our latest releases, upcoming changes, and some interesting things we’ve learned in the past month. 

🚀 Releases of Note

Tag pages get an uplift 

We’ve rolled out enhancements to our Tag pages. Tags are used to describe our stories: think person, place, thing, company. When tags are added to stories they are referenced in that article’s schema markup, and eligible to be surfaced on the article text as informational tooltips called “Explainers”. Every Tag has a corresponding page, and in an effort to improve those pages and make them more useful, we’ve added a few enhancements. 

We’ve added infinite-scroll on so you can easily peruse all of the latest stories for a Tag, a Highlighted Stories section where stories are featured based on certain conditions, and a Featured Author section that automatically highlights an author who has written extensively on the subject. 

Related Stories

Across our articles we’ve introduced a new recirculation module called Related stories. It follows in the foot-steps of our Read More and Most Popular recirculation modules. It links stories based on Tags, prioritizing people and companies, and then places. We will adjust the algorithm as we learn more, and currently you’ll see it rotate between our other recirculation modules on article pages. Give it a click! 

Impact Report

We’ve published our second annual Impact Report! The report uses our new brand colors and styles. We also added a nifty little promo to the homepage. Check it out and see all of the wonderful work we did last year.

🚧 Coming soon…

We’re working on an exciting new custom editorial project with an experimental design and fun interactive elements. Sign up to our newsletter to be the first in the know when it drops!

📈 Product Stats

We’ve been experimenting with new donation callouts (we’re nonprofit and reader supported, if you didn’t know…) We’ve been measuring engagement with these callouts by tracking when the module is viewed, and when it’s clicked, and what variation of our promo was displayed. As it stands only 0.16% of views drove a click to our donation page. Our optimistic goal was to be closer to 0.5% so while a disappointing result we hope it still raised more awareness of our mission and non-profit status.

As this donation campaign comes to and end, we will be rethinking our approach for our next campaign. We will tailor our messaging so that it’s more targeted and action-oriented.

🤔 Questions and Feedback

We’d love to hear more from you, our readers, about what features you like (or don’t like) on our site. We’re also always happy to talk shop on media products, frontend development and design. Feel free to drop us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you have any feedback, questions or suggestions. We’d love to hear from you. 

Until next time. 👋