RD.com Website Design Review

ARTICLE SNIPPET - Reader's Digest Online Version is a Great Example of an Old Brand Taking their Show Online Successfully.

Reader's Digest is so well known and widely read that almost everybody has picked up a copy at some point in their lives. Founded in 1922, the family friendly, feel-good favorite is also the flagship of a billion dollar public company. The Reader's Digest is the largest-selling magazine in the world, and the company uses their circulation power to sell a plethora of books, magazines, games and children's titles, and recently music video and audio books.

RD.com draws in over 600,000 monthly unique users. We'll see in this review how the site RD.com expands the value of the print brand by bringing their trademark interactivity and community strengths right onto the small screen.

• It isn't obvious to a casual user that subscribing is a priority action. RD.com doesn't ignore this goal, but the design places subscription offers in the background, and is unnecessarily subtle compared to the rest of the site.
• They've done a great job in content webification. The homepage has a TV-screen like display, they've got "RD Out Loud," which is a podcast service, they have a ton of interactive tools and lots of games.
• Throughout the site, when reading articles, the user is often prodded to submit a joke or comment—to participate. The site has the same community feel that the magazine has always been famous for.
• With a slightly older age range of readers, RD.com is ahead of the curve with their super-usable "click to enlarge or reduce font sizes" A+ A- [[icons]].
• RD.com integrates well with Reader's Digest on paper, each one references the other. The user will "get" that these are two ways of naming the same brand.

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