Since 2020, through our studio, we’ve been helping media organizations strengthen their value proposition, create clear user journeys for their audiences, maintain control over their tools… and redesign their websites. We’ve created or redesigned the websites of dozens of media outlets, including POLITICO, Vert, 60 Millions de consommateurs, Le Cri, Tenoua, Philosophie Magazine, Pays, and many others.
Why Now?
We are therefore delighted to have brought our media outlet, our studio, and our network together under one roof to increase our impact and make our offerings more accessible to our audiences, who have changed significantly over the past five years: media executives, journalists, and creators, both in France and across Europe.
We have indeed become more European by coordinating our network of independent media outlets, Sphera, over the past two years. Our perspective on both practices and usage has become sharper, and we have published more content in various formats (text, audio, video). The team has grown and become more structured: while there were five of us in 2021, there are nearly 20 of us today. And two key areas have been strengthened: on the one hand, the hands-on work alongside the media outlets we support (management, marketing, design, tech, admin, etc.) as well as the tools we’re now developing to pool our efforts (with Socle, among others); and on the other hand, journalistic and forward-looking reflection on their independence. It was becoming difficult to understand why we had two separate websites—one for the media outlet and the other for the studio—to showcase different aspects of our work. The new website makes this reality more visible.
In practical terms, we needed to help every visitor quickly understand where they are, what they’re doing, andMédianes what they canMédianes do for their media outlet. We built our new website using the method we already apply at the organizations we support (we’ll tell you more about that below!) and drawing on the insights and ideas we develop every day.
What's New
- A single entry point: Media, Studio, and Network are now all in one place, and the homepage directs each user to the section that applies to them. The main homepage provides an overview of the three pillars, while each section then has its own portal.
- Technical choices focused on open-source tools: The site puts into practice what we advocate regarding digital independence. We developed new features ourselves so that we would no longer have to rely on plug-ins or opaque proprietary services. For the CMS, we chose WordPress, which is open source and consistent with what we recommend.
- Paths by Profile: A media outlet seeking guidance, a journalist covering issues of independence, a European partner looking for information—everyone now has their own path.
- Bridging the gap between media, studios, and networks: Making it easier to discover other topics or areas of expertise from Médianes.
- An index: Here we provide a comprehensive list of the projects completed by [organization]Médianes, including those that are not presented as individual projects.
- A redesigned article page: More readable, it links to a resource, related expertise, and the newsletter.
- Improved navigation through projects: Navigation by category and square images (when editorial images are in landscape format) to better identify the media outlets featured and provide an initial understanding of the type of project carried out.
- Sharing Our Monitoring Findings: A “What We’re Reading” section that allows us to publicly share the information we find most relevant, directly on our website. We tried to implement this feature in 2022, but it wasn’t very user-friendly.
The Starting Point
In the meantime, we’dMédianes been operating on two separate sites since 2021 (you know the saying, “the cobbler’s children have no shoes”? We know it all too well). On one hand, medianes.org hosted our editorial content: articles, newsletters, how-to guides, and case studies. On the other, medianes.studio showcased the studio’s work: client case studies, projects, and training programs. Each site had its own back-end, its own navigation structure, and its own way of presenting our work. In the meantime, we created or redesigned other, lighter-weight sites like programme.medianes.org to highlight our various activities as a media outlet, consulting studio, European network, and support program—and even used the personal portfolio of Christelle Perrin, our design director, to showcase certain projects. These piecemeal efforts scattered the project across too many places. For new visitorsMédianes, this fragmentation muddled the message. For our team, it doubled the workload for publishing and maintenance.
Why did we have two websites at first?
When we launched inMédianes 2020, we had two projects in mind: a for-profit venture—the consulting studio—and a nonprofit initiative—the media outlet and mutual aid network. Being big fans of administrative work, we set up two legal entities: an SAS and a nonprofit association. Naturally, we thought it made sense to separate the consulting studio’s website (medianes.studio) from the media platform (medianes.org). We believed that our two areas of activity didn’t necessarily appeal to the same audiences. Above all, we wanted to make the media platform a fully-fledged journalistic entity. We wanted to avoid giving the impression that it was simply the studio’s blog. We have in-house journalists, and we wanted to emphasize their independence in analyzing media trends. For several years, this separation had been working against us by complicating the user experience… and, above all, we realized that independence wasn’t about having two separate websites.
Our method, as applied to ourselves
We mentioned earlier the saying about the cobbler’s children having no shoes: let’s be honest, this project was slow to get off the ground. While we’re capable of delivering flawless website redesigns for our valued clients in 3 to 6 months—as we did with Vert, POLITICO, or currently with Socialter, we must admit that we often put the redesign of our own site on hold to focus on client projects, media challenges, or internal restructuring—such as the integration of the team and Sphera in 2025. The website redesign became a priority again in the spring of 2026, after we had redefined our value proposition and vision. At that point, a clear organizational structure was put in place, and we took advantage of the summer to have everyone contribute to this project.
We had to start by focusing on the team’s needs and our goals. Since our first mockups, which dated back to 2024, a lot had changed: so we checked, division by division (media, studio, network), to ensure the site remained aligned with our target audiences and with everyone’s usage patterns, right down to the back office. And since 2024, it wasn’t just our needs that had changed, but also our tools: the introduction of Claude Code also allowed us to develop this website more quickly.
After this initial internal brainstorming session, we were able to discuss it with Maxime Loisel, an independent UX consultant. We then worked with our friends at Studio 9P to benefit from their expert, outside perspective—and because it’s hard to take a step back and look at your own work objectively.
The entire project was carried out in-house, guided by a product-centric approach to make decisions and a RACI matrix to determine who makes decisions: marketing perspective and priorities, graphic design and user journey, development and testing, and content writing. We brought together experts from every field—including training and editorial—to tailor the mockups to the team’s current needs (including the back office!) while staying aligned with our target audiences. We then moved forward in sprints thanks to the meticulous project leadership of Dorine Planté, our support manager. It was a real pleasure to join forces in this final stretch and put into practice the methods we apply to others.
Behind the Scenes
Leading a cross-functional project with the entire team, alongside client assignments, is first and foremost a management challenge: carving out time, clarifying each person’s role, making quick decisions, and maintaining momentum over the long term. Dorine played a central role in project management here.
Dorine’s fresh perspective, combined with that of Charlène Hourdin, Nicolas Troadec, and Noé Mellier on the web side, was invaluable in raising questions about the mockups that Christelle Perrin and Baptiste Thevelein had created the previous year.
Together, we developed an action plan and a to-do list with tickets assigned to each request. We also implemented a comprehensive testing phase and a process for the entire team to report questions and issues. It was this crystal-clear organization that united the team around a common goal and helped maintain a cheerful work atmosphere. We are now convinced that for any internal project—especially cross-functional ones—even when it seems like it will be quick, we need clear organization and project leadership.
Design: Adapting the Art Direction to the Web and the Need for a Handcrafted Look
The mockups were designed in-house by Christelle. We began working on the mockups with a focus on readability; we wanted a visually light design that would serve as a showcase for the media’s ideas and the projects produced by the studio. We used light shades, drawn from the overall artistic direction:Médianes blues for the media, paired with beiges for the studio, to create a very subtle distinction between these spaces.
The menu structure and navigation paths have been refined to clarify the editorial and commercial offerings of [name]Médianes, and to make it easier for users to discover and move from one section to another.
Since the first mockups, the media landscape has changed significantly with the advent of artificial intelligence and the rise of automatically generated websites and graphic design guidelines: we felt it was essential to also add some textural elements: illustrations created with felt-tip pens, oil paint, and charcoal on paper, then digitized. The idea was to restore a warmer, more human feel and to add a bit of texture to a website that is otherwise very focused on efficiency and technology.
Editorial: Keep, Rewrite, and Delete
We’ve done the very work we’re asking all media outlets to do. Above all, this involves making choices and striking a balance between editorial content, marketing, and user interface: we had lengthy discussions to ensure consistency between content and form.
We also developed a categorization system to organize articles and columns on various topics so that the content is no longer presented solely in chronological order.
Nous avons également importé l’intégralité des newsletters de Médianes depuis leur lancement. Leurs contenus n’étaient jusqu’ici accessibles qu’aux personnes qui les avaient reçues : ils forment désormais des archives ouvertes à toutes et tous. Cette reprise d’historique a représenté un travail important, dont nous sommes particulièrement fier·es.
Technique : allier la sobriété à la souveraineté
L’intégration a été menée en quelques mois par l’équipe de Médianes. Ce projet a aussi été l’occasion de conjuguer une démarche d’éco-conception avec une volonté de performance et d’efficacité. Nous avons ainsi utilisé différents modèles d’IA et orchestrateurs pour organiser et répartir le travail d’intégration et aboutir à un code propre et fiable, rapidement.
Le site est construit avec l’éditeur de blocs Gutenberg en full site editing, sur la base d’un thème volontairement minimal qui permet de composer tout type d’expérience. Les deux back-offices ont laissé place à un seul, où chaque type de contenu dispose de son propre modèle et de son propre gabarit : formations, cas pratiques, projets, articles, newsletters.
Plutôt que d’empiler des extensions, nous avons choisi de concevoir nous-mêmes plusieurs briques essentielles :
- un mur de restriction d’accès aux contenus ;
- l’enregistrement d’articles pour les lire plus tard ;
- un espace compte pour les lecteur·ices ;
- la gestion des inscriptions aux newsletters ;
- un parcours d’inscription repensé de A à Z.
Ce site nous sert aussi de laboratoire. Plusieurs de ces briques ont vocation à être réutilisables et transmises aux médias que nous accompagnons.
L’hébergement est assuré par Infomaniak, hébergeur suisse avec lequel nous travaillons depuis plusieurs années et avec qui nous entretenons une relation de confiance.
What now?
Cette refonte nous a permis de clarifier notre identité, de simplifier le travail de nos équipes et de construire des outils que nous pourrons partager avec les médias que nous accompagnons. Elle illustre la manière dont nous aimons travailler : en open source, avec sobriété, en faisant nous-mêmes ce qui compte vraiment.
Le site est en ligne, mais les évolutions et la maintenance vont continuer. Pour nos clients comme pour nous, nous avons une logique de produit minimum viable afin d’éviter de repousser indéfiniment les sorties en espérant atteindre un jour la perfection. Du temps est désormais prévu pour réparer des bugs inattendus, compléter de nouvelles fonctionnalités telles que les alertes email ou rédiger les textes que nous n’avons pas eu le temps de finaliser et avons masqués pour ne pas empêcher la mise en ligne.
Un grand merci à toute l’équipe qui a porté ce projet, à l’agence 9P et à celles et ceux qui ont testé et relu en chemin. Et maintenant, à vous : dites-nous ce qui marche et ce qui manque.
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