September often feels like a bit of a reset button, a time to sharpen focus after the summer, as the leaves start to turn. At Rest of World, we’ve been busy rolling out updates that improve how readers discover stories, recognize contributors, and navigate the site.

Here’s what we’ve been up to this month:

What we did 🚀

Contributor Index

This month we launched our Contributor Index. It features every single person that has authored a story for Rest of World. Our goal is to improve visibility for the journalists that make Rest of World what it is. It’s a resource for both ourselves, and for readers who are curious about the people behind our stories.

The index can be navigated alphabetically by last name, and we’ve made the navigation sticky so that you can easily move between letters. For individuals, we display their name and short biography, flagging if they are a staff member, and link to their corresponding contributor page where you can see their full biography and everything they’ve written for us.

In addition to the alphabetical index, we also followed up with a Recently Published module that features the 12 most recent authors who have published stories on Rest of World. We use horizontal scrolling so that you can peruse them all, and we feature their latest story, as well as teasing the image from the story. 

Accessibility improvements

Earlier this year we did our own internal accessibility audit that highlighted some key changes we could make. We used Chrome Lighthouse tools and the devAxe chrome plugin to audit our web pages and made a note of all of the issues highlighted in the reports. We set a goal to fix highlighted issues and finally get the all 100% green rating in Lighthouse on our standard articles. This we decided was “good enough” given our very small team. It’s preferable to use screen readers and other assistive technologies and actually navigate your site experience to surface real accessibility issues for real people, which we will endeavour to do as part of our next audit. However, happy to say we at least achieved that 100 rating for now.

We achieved the score in multiple ways. Firstly we educated our editorial and visuals teams on the importance of alternative text on images, and even enabled a plugin that uses openAI’s GPT4.0 Mini API to generate descriptive alt-text to support them. We also coached our peers on the proper use of subheadings in articles and page heading semantics. In addition, we addressed some key issues with html semantics on our articles pages, ensuring that headings were in logical descending order, adding aria roles and appropriate labelling, and ensuring every element is accessible to screen readers.

Accessibility is an ongoing conversation and learning exercise, so while we certainly have a lot more to do, it’s nice to see measurable improvements on the site.

RSS Promo

We have RSS feeds for all of our latest stories, for our sections, series and regions, but we don’t actively promote them except in our footer, site navigation and platforms page. 

In an effort to make them more visible (and after some feedback in user interviews that not everyone is a newsletter fan) we’ve extended our promotional management platform (this is the platform that allows us to show and display our own promotional and recirculations units given certain criteria using a simple configuration setup) so that we can display elements on our pages given certain referrer criteria. So if someone is referred from search or certain sites we can display Related Stories, and if someone is referred from social we can display Most Popular etc. 

We’re utilizing these new changes to display our RSS feed promotion to those who visit us from HackerNews and Reddit, because readers who come from those platforms have a tendency to utilize RSS readers more so than others. 

What we learned

Merch store

We’ve had our pop-up merch store live for the last few weeks, and since then we’ve had visitors from the US (60%), Australia (9%), India (5%), Canada (3%) and a host of other countries. We’ve had sales from the US, Germany, Italy and Japan among others. Our most popular items have been our white mug, followed by our black tee and black tote. Our limited edition mug and socks are not selling like hot cakes in the way I anticipated – but there’s just really no accounting for taste these days…

In case you missed it

As mentioned we’ve launched a pop-up merch store! We’ll be pausing our store at the end of the month, so if you do so happen to purchase some of the most stylish socks on the market, now’s the time. 

Finally…

As we approach the last quarter of the year, we’re looking forward to developing a longer-term strategy for next year. If you’re a regular reader, we always appreciate hearing about your experience of reading Rest of World, and any feedback you have. Please feel free to shoot us an email at hello@restofworld.org if you’ve got any ideas, requests for features or feedback for us. 

Roll on decorative gourd season. 🎃