PerthNow was acquired by West Australian Newspapers (WAN, part of Southern Cross Media) in 2015, and has grown to become Perth’s leading free source for local news and entertainment, reaching over 3.4 million unique users per month.

A decade on, WAN embraced the challenge of evolving this well-loved brand and platform—meeting the modern reader where they are, while driving higher engagement across the site. Some of the current issues identified include:

1. A lack of personalisation in user experience and page structures.

2. An outdated information architecture.

3. A need to create simpler article templates and structures.

The redesign brings the focus back to the reader—delivering the stories that matter most to the people of Perth and surfacing them with greater clarity, visibility, and consistency to match user’s expectations.

A key insight from user research revealed that PerthNow needed to build greater trust with users by ensuring both content and brand met their expectations. This informed WAN’s approach to categorization, ensuring that readers consistently encountered relevant content in expected places. Additionally, WAN reinforced PerthNow’s commitment to local journalism, carefully balancing high-traffic content with our core editorial values.

WAN focused on improving the website’s topic taxonomy to enhance clarity, organisation and visibility. By refining the hierarchy and structure of content, WAN provided better context for each article and made it easier for users to navigate and discover stories of interest.

The redesign has had a positive impact across multiple engagement metrics, including homepage returning users, header/navigation clicks and comments per session.