Design of Web site and content management system
Feb 1999

This Is Money is a personal finance site from the Daily Mail family of newspapers in London. It combines real-time news and market feeds with performance charts, interactive calculators, advice, and discussion boards.

CHALLENGE
The site is for regular people investing for a home or their kids' college, not day-traders or financial experts. It needed to be credible but still friendly and approachable.

Also, the journalists needed to be able to maintain the site themselves without depending day-to-day on technologists or programmers.

SOLUTION
The financial data is no-nonsense and trustworthy, but the color scheme, iconography, and photographic emphasis on people keep the site from feeling too staid. Helpful features like pop-up definitions of financial jargon take some of the mystery out of complex topics.

The back-end publishing system was built in tandem with the site and two journalists were able to maintain the site, entering content, photos, links, all through a browser interface. (More on the publishing system)

The site won two British Interactive Media Awards -- Best Home Reference Site and Best News and Information Service -- beating out sites from Encyclopaedia Britannica, The British Library, BBC Multimedia, and British Telecom.

MY ROLE
All graphic and UI design (except the icon illustrations) for the site and publishing system, all HTML.

www.thisismoney.com