The jury were impressed by the strong focus on accessibility and mental health concerns in their development of the user experience – the team also shifted domain, delivered sustainability improvements and, through all this change, delivered year-on-year growth.

The PinkNews mission is to inform, inspire change and empower people to be themselves. Last year they embarked on a huge project to help improve the accessibility and reach of their LGBTQ+ content to ensure it could be accessed by as many people as possible. The in-house tech team rebuilt the entire website and apps from scratch following WCAG guidelines to make them as

inclusive and accessible as possible, including switching the domain to a .com to increase visibility globally and upgrading the CMS to give the editorial team more control over how they present and curate their content.

The Product and Tech team worked alongside the Editorial and Audience teams to plan and build a website centred around accessibility and inclusivity for readers, whilst being easily scalable for future growth. By building everything from scratch, they were able to build an innovative and reimagined look which represents the PinkNews brand. A large amount of time was spent

creating their component and module library so that they could ensure consistency across platforms and make it easy for everything to scale. The new website follows Web Content Accessibility Guidelines (WCAG) for a more inclusive digital experience including all site colours passing accessibility tests for visually impaired people, choosing a font and size that is easy

to read and incorporating an elastic search to make it quicker and easier for readers to find what they are looking for.

Next, they plan to roll out a text-to-speech functionality on articles for those with visual impairments and those who prefer to listen to the news. The team also spent time deleting redundant code and housing all images within one media library, which not only sped up load times but also improved their sustainability rating. The new website is now placed within the top 7% of global websites tested for emitting fewer carbon emissions, an improvement of 70 per cent compared to the previous site.

The team also produced an uplifting news filter, a global first for PinkNews which allows our audience to only read and view positive news stories if they choose.

The website only relaunched in November 2022, but the initial feedback from their audience has been extremely positive. The site is still in the process of being fully indexed according to Google, but they’ve already seen their organic traffic exceed their monthly average for last year – and at the time of entering, they were close to beating their all-time monthly record. The average time spent per session has increased 31% YOY.

The uplifting news filter is linked to the new app’s personalisation capabilities, allowing each reader to have a more personalised digital experience with PinkNews content. Within the new app, each person can create a personalised news feed based on their preference, which as enable testimonials from their audience including: “The ‘uplifting content only’ feature is a fantastic addition for helping people with mental health issues… well done for adding it!”

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