FWi launches a new look
Visitors to Farmers Weekly Interactive since January can’t fail to have noticed a big change we made to the home page of the site.
Now, after months of research and testing, that new look has been rolled out across the rest of FWi, offering great features, functionality and a user experience which is second to none in the world of farming on the web.
Over the past year we’ve listened to users’ views about how we can improve FWi to enable them to get the most out of the vast array of content on offer; to make it the best possible online gateway to news, views and transaction across all aspects of agriculture.
Central to the redesign is a new look and feel, allowing users to “jump off” to any area of interest they choose.
The most obvious change is the relocation of the navigation bar from down the left-hand side of the site to across the top of the page, making better use of the full screen width, which has allowed us to provide more content options, at a glance.
On arrival at the home page the different farming sectors – livestock, arable, dairy and so on – are automatically displayed in the navigation bar.
The new-look displays a much broader mix ranging from breaking news and features, reports and advice, through to more “transactional” options such as buying and selling second-hand equipment, searching for a job or property, or even testing your knowledge with our Farmers Weekly e-learning academy.
One of the big changes is to showcase more of our interactive content at the click of the button. Users can navigate directly to our forums & photos and opinion & blogs pages using the top navigation bar. But on the home page, and also on the individual farming sector “channel” pages, the latest added comments and images to our social media platform FWi Space (and our FW blogs) are highlighted dynamically.
This includes the latest blog post from our FW bloggers, the most recent forum response, images added by users to the photo galleries on FWiSpace, plus the latest videos and the most-read articles.
The redesign of the site also means that on every page you access, the weather forecast, which you can set for your location, is displayed. And throughout the site users can use the search field to find content and filter it by news, jobs, products and so on.
We’ve redesigned the layout of the Farmers Weekly Academy too so all the academy modules on offer can be seen or filtered according to the sector of interest.
Another updated feature is the events calendar. We want this to become the definitive destination in UK agriculture to find out what’s going on for farming events, seminars, and the like. Users can upload event information themselves and become a contributor to this part of the site.
We’ll keep developing new ideas and features. The new technology which we have built the site on offers us much more flexibility and agility.
As our recent advertising campaign said: “Agriculture is evolving”. Have a look around the site to see just how fast.