Redesigning a media CMS without stopping the media company

Not just a new system

It is tempting to treat a CMS like any other software: gather requirements, design a modern interface, ship it. But every media company works in its own way. One desk publishes breaking news in seconds, another spends days on an investigation, and a third lives on video. The tools have to fit those rhythms, the shortcuts editors rely on and the habits they have built over years, often under pressure. A system that ignores them will be worked around from day one.

That means a great deal of UX work before any screen is final: watching editors at work, mapping how a story actually moves from draft to homepage and finding the places where minutes are lost every single day. In newsrooms, a few saved clicks per article add up to hours by the end of the week.

Leading rather than collecting wishes

Ask a media company what it wants from a new system and you will receive a long list, from every desk, every editor and every manager. Many of the wishes are reasonable. Some contradict each other. A few would quietly undo the whole point of the redesign. Trying to satisfy all of them produces a system that is heavier than the one it replaces.

So part of the job is to cut. I listen carefully, then I take the lead: this goes in, this waits, this we do differently. It takes some courage, and it only works if the reasons are clear and the people affected feel heard. But a redesign without a firm hand ends up as a collection of compromises, and editors are the first to feel it.

The archive sets the limits

The second lesson concerns the portal, and it is less glamorous but just as important. A media portal carries years, sometimes decades, of published content, and migration is a huge part of any redesign. The new design cannot drift too far from what that content can support.

Imagine a beautiful new layout with thumbnails a hundred times larger than before, and an archive full of small, low-resolution images that were perfectly adequate for the old design. Overnight, thousands of articles look broken. The same happens with headlines that suddenly need to be shorter, categories that no longer map cleanly or video embeds in formats the new player does not understand.

So before the design is approved, I look at the archive as closely as at the new screens. What sizes are the images really? How long are the headlines? What will an article from ten years ago look like in the new template? The answers shape the design, and they save the team from a launch that looks great for new stories and dreadful for everything else.

Changing everything without stopping anything

Put together, the approach is calm and gradual. The new system is shaped around how the company really works, the scope is defined by clear decisions rather than endless wishes, and the portal is designed with its past in mind. Changes roll out in stages, desk by desk, while the news keeps flowing.

When it works, editors notice mostly that their day has become easier, and readers notice mostly that the site feels faster and clearer. Nobody notices the months of careful work underneath, and in media, that is exactly how it should be.