In August, WWD revealed a new website, one that boasts a host of new features, including a curated homepage, an amplified zoom feature for runway images, a prominent spot for its Twitter feed and departments designed to highlight the newsmakers of the day. Sophia Chabbott, WWD’s Digital Director, joined the Penske Media Corp.-owned company at the time of the launch, charged with making sure the hottest stories get the right placement, that social media is serving up the right mix of what the public wants to read about and that WWD’s paywall lures new subscribers. Here, Sophia, who is formerly of Glamour.com and Saks.com, discusses with Beauty Insider some of the key changes to the industry’s most-read fashion source that has a social following of 2.9 million Twitter followers, 760,000 Facebook followers and 487,000 Instagram followers.

Beauty Insider: What are the different ways a reader can experience WWD?


Sophia Chabbott: There’s the site, the daily digital PDF and the weekly magazine. All the content is customized for each platform. The PDF is the classic WWD story; the site is optimized to share and click through on social; the magazine has big, beautiful images and longer stories.

It’s really interesting being a news organization and finding that voice that is sophisticated, smart and current and still be able to talk to the reader or the follower on their platform of choice in their own vernacular.

BI: What’s the most exciting thing about the new site?
SC: I can’t take credit for making the site as beautiful and as fast as it is, but it does have many firsts. One key initiative was building a curated homepage. There are a lot of sites where the homepage isn’t as important, but we have a nice amount of traffic that comes through the homepage so we wanted it to be editor curated with the most important stories at the top giving a 360 snapshot of what is happening in fashion on any given day.

BI: What are some of the best features of the homepage?
SC: The carousel at the top of the homepage features the three most important stories of the day. The homepage is split into three different sections, the left and right rails, and the river—the center section. On the homepage’s left rail are features such as The Essentialist, which is curated by the organization’s editors as the five must-read stories of the day. Scrolling down the left rail are the site’s various verticals—fashion, business, media, beauty, men, accessories. Then there’s WWD’s Twitter feed and a feature called Newsmakers covering the most talked about people in the news. The river features automatically populated stories with larger images. On the right rail are image galleries, including [the long-standing celebrity/gossip column] Eye; [the latest designer items on] Collections, and [the popular street-fashion feature], They Are Wearing.

BI: How did the site upgrade it runway coverage?


SC: Bottom line it’s much faster, the way it updates within seconds and downloads all of the images. A key upgrade here is the zoom function, where a user can zoom in on an image to see clothing and makeup details. A ‘details’ function spotlights a noteworthy part of an image, say the detail on a collar or a button fastener, with a super high resolution detail of the image. At the bottom of the runway page are archived images. The photo archive is a work in progress where we are working to digitize and subsequently post the tens of thousands of images we own.

BI: How does WWD decide what stories to make public?


SC: We have a paywall, which is something we believe in. The stories that are in front of it are often celebrity stories, media stories and select stories that we think should be out there and shared on social. All of the stories on social are optimized for the platform, meaning tweaked headlines that are optimized for search. So a story on Facebook will have the right headline and language for the Facebook user, the same for Twitter and Pinterest. Developing content for social that helps us break news and connect with a new reader, maybe a younger reader or someone who is recreationally into fashion even though they are not in the industry, is the strategy there.

Even though Instagram is not a traffic generator, it’s about bringing followers breaking news or showing collections early. We’ve been playing with long-form Instagram where we post a quote from one of our reviews from Fashion Week.

We also do these ICYMI [in case you missed it] posts to deliver news from events such as Milan Fashion Week, with music and news headlines, making them daily videos. We also have our very first predator, a producer/editor, Leah Jubara, who is producing videos. Some are planned far in advance; some are on the fly. She also produces awesome Instagram videos. Instagram is so important to our industry because it’s so visual and these days you hear of a brand and before you do anything else you look to see if they have an Instagram page, so we are really focused on that, too.