Relaunch of mylife.de

The Burda site mylife.de belongs to the leading portals in Germany featuring the topics of health, fitness and nutrition. The Thunder site underwent an intensive relaunch in the past year in which two Certified Thunder Integrators (CTIs) undpaul and galaniprojects were involved. In this case study they report on the challenges experienced and how they dealt with them.

The Burda site mylife.de went live in 2016 and belongs to the leading portals in Germany featuring the topics of health, fitness and nutrition. Numerous detailed publications and informative articles can be found on the platform covering the areas of family, health, fitness, balance and nutrition which are published by the mylife editing team with great attention to detail. Exciting interviews and groundbreaking trends complete the program on offer and keep visitors up to date at all times.

Screenshot Mylife

The first relaunch was due at the end of 2019. Product manager Franziska Fey explains that the greatest changes were made in the backend. “We have restructured the entire content. Until now we had used a lot of special tags but this became too confusing. Now we have developed a structure tree which has been mapped in our taxonomy.”

A big challenge has been mapping the new structure in the breadcrumb navigation and the URLs. “We therefore divided the content roughly into two categories 'magazine' for magazine articles and 'topic' for background information” explains Franziska. “And then of course all the old content still needs to be tagged.”

This was done by hand. “This was necessary because we wanted to ensure that all articles were tagged with the exactly right keywords” says Franziska. "With the help of the structure tree we can now ensure that users are actually suggested all articles which optimally match the article and complement a topic area." The articles are now easier to find due to the new structure and the navigation’s user-friendliness has been improved.

All of this was implemented by the CTI undpaul. According to account manager Andreas Votteler the challenge lay in mapping the new taxonomy structure without the article classifications being lost. “In the new taxonomy structure over 32,000 terms were linked to each other with the help of a migration” he explains.

In a second step the visual display of the taxonomy structure has been revised. “It was not possible at first to map the new structure in the backend, such that editors could maintain this structure in a simple and straightforward manner”, says Andreas Votteler. “An additional module was therefore brought in and customised to the new requirements. Every term can now be controlled and customised, regardless of the hierarchy – and this without loss of performance in the backend.“ Franziska adds: “The editors can see the entire tree and can achieve good visibility of the topic areas and articles.”

 

This is what the website mylife.de looked like before the relaunch:

Screenshot former mylife.de

This is what the website mylife.de looked like before the relaunch.

 

The second large project was the frontend. “During the years in sales we have become more familiar with the needs of our users and developed new advertising formats for our advertising customers which we wanted displayed in the frontend”, remembers Franziska. On mylife there were and are many different elements such as compulsory texts and native advertisements such as teasers, co-branding, logos and links. “The art was the functional merger of all compulsory notices and links in the pharma advertising sector in the design concept”, explains Franziska.

Andreas Krautzberger from our CTI galaniprojects was primarily responsible for the website’s new design and summarises the challenge as follows: “Despite an abundance of information, the site must not give the impression of being cluttered and overwhelm the user”. Andreas Krautzberger therefore used friendly colours and white for airiness in the articles and various teasers for lightness on the overview pages. He developed small teasers to make more articles visible on the pages at the same time and placed the title in the picture. Advertising and affiliate links have been made recognisable via grey blocks and in this way remain well integrated in the website.

The site was designed more narrowly for greater clarity. Since mylife.de has a particularly high number of mobile users, “mobile first” was at the forefront during the rebrush. “A lot of people say this but the customers themselves or their customers often want to see the desktop version first” says Andreas Krautzberger. “Not so with mylife.de. With this I really did begin with the mobile screens, thought through this pattern some more and then expanded it to the design possibilities of larger displays.”

An additional feature is the new “Balance” area. Andreas Votteler explains. “In the backend articles can be tagged with the new area, in the frontend this then changes the layout and colour scheme.” By using the taxonomy structure the article’s classification is then changed in the frontend.

Screenshot Mylife

The rebrush should mean the people behind mylife.de become more visible. “In all things SEO it is becoming more and more important for a trustworthy author to be behind the article”, explains Franziska. “We have therefore put profiles together for our authors and experts and introduced structured data.”

Screenshot Mylife

Finally a clever logic of error tolerance was brought to the site’s own full text search. Should a search query be written incorrectly or contain only three letters, the system will search for the most relevant results for the articles. “The results are presented to the user as suggestions on a visually attractive site and enable the content to be found quicker, more directly and easily”, says Andreas Votteler. This also enables other similar topics or those awaiting discovery to be presented.

Franziska is very satisfied with the implementation of all these ideas: “undpaul has managed with speed and competence to master our requirements for the relaunch of mylife.de. The cooperation was very enriching on the personal as well as on the technical level. We are anticipating our continued work together with trust and hope to have just as much fun.”

Andreas Votteler is also pleased. “Together we were able to bring the advantages of the agile methodology to the fore with quick feedback loops and uncomplicated workflows. A beautiful and modern product is the result which makes available detailed information on health questions with even greater speed.