bianet.org – Redesigning Turkey’s independent news platform

Snapshot

• Team: strategy shaped with bianet’s Evren Gönül (project lead), Korcan Uğur and Murat İnceoğlu · back-end engineering by Mehmet Tirgil · content by the bianet editorial team
• Timeline: research & strategy 2022 → design & build 2022–23 → launched Sep 2023 → in production since
• Partnership: bianet’s design partner since 2015 — 40+ commissioned projects

The problem: a respected newsroom on a declining site

bianet has practiced rights-focused, independent journalism for more than two decades — in Turkish, English and Kurdish. I had been its design partner for seven years when, in 2022, we agreed the question was bigger than a reskin: how should an independent newsroom live on today’s internet?

The numbers said the old model was fading. In the site’s final full year (Jul 2021–Jun 2022, Universal Analytics): 13.8M pageviews, down 18% year on year; 8.0M visitors, down 14%; 87% of visits ended on the first page; roughly 90% of traffic arrived from Google search — a single point of failure; 75% of readers came on phones, to a site designed before mobile-first was the norm. The ten-year curve had peaked in 2019–20 and was falling.

And behind the numbers: trust in Turkish news media at 36% (Reuters Institute, 2022), rising news avoidance, and an attention economy rewarding exactly the practices a rights-focused newsroom refuses to use.

UX research first: 15 readers, 90 minutes each

Before drawing anything, I ran a three-part study — and delivered it as a 35-page strategy report the newsroom adopted as the project brief.

• 15 one-to-one interviews, ~90 minutes each — balanced by gender, ages 20 to 50+, from press, NGOs and the private sector. How people actually meet the news: when, where, on what, and what makes them stop reading.
• Literature review — Reuters Institute Digital News Reports, We Are Social/Kepios data, and academic work on news fatigue, deliberate ignorance and reading behavior.
• Analytics archaeology — Bianet’s Google Analytics, one year in section-level detail, ten years in trend.

What it surfaced shaped every later decision. Readers described an “endless now” of breaking-news noise and their own deliberate withdrawal from it. They didn’t want more news; they wanted to finish something and feel informed, not flooded. They trusted calm presentation over urgency theatrics. And in the interviews Bianet itself scored high on trust and archive value — but read as distant, and its site as old.

The strategy: don’t chase the feed

The research pointed away from the industry’s default playbook. We made five decisions and held them:

1. Position around calm, deep journalism — not breaking-news volume. Bianet cannot and should not out-shout the mainstream. Fewer, better-presented stories; the two-decade archive treated as an asset, not a basement.
2. Make presentation a trust signal. A strict typographic hierarchy for scanning; headlines and standfirsts never truncated mid-thought; galleries, visuals and embeds only where they build the story — no click-stretching.
3. One platform, three languages. Turkish, English and Kurdî unified in a single information architecture with shared templates — and sections the data showed were buried (Kadın, Çocuk, Biamag) surfaced.
4. Diversify how readers arrive. Reduce the ~90% search dependence: platform-specific sharing patterns, related-content paths designed against the 87% one-page exit, newsletter touchpoints.
5. Protect two decades of URL equity. The migration preserved and redirected content addresses so the archive’s search standing carried over to the new platform.

Design system & build

I designed the system and wrote the front-end, working directly with bianet’s newsroom — the strategy shaped with Evren Gönül, Korcan Uğur and Murat İnceoğlu on the bianet side.

• A component-based design system: typography scale, color and spacing tokens, icon set, card and listing components, and page templates for every editorial shape — news, long-form, dossiers, multimedia, category fronts.
• Editorial autonomy by design: templates the newsroom can run at daily-news pace without a designer in the loop — the system, not my availability, keeps the site coherent.
• Mobile-first, three scripts, slow connections: three-quarters of readers were on phones before the redesign, and three-quarters still are — the platform is built from the small screen up.
• Built from the ground up, no theme, no framework: I designed and wrote the front-end in HTML, CSS, JavaScript and PHP; Mehmet Tirgil ported it to .NET and built the back-end that does the heavy lifting — AWS infrastructure, .NET services, database.

The new bianet.org went live in September 2023 and has run on the same design system since — serving 29M+ pages in its latest measured year.

Outcome: the decline reversed

Twelve months of mature production (Jul 2025–Jun 2026, GA4, bot-filtered) against the last full year of the old site (Jul 2021–Jun 2022, UA):

For scale: the new platform’s 29.2M yearly views don’t just beat the declining baseline — they exceed the site’s 2019 all-time peak (20.1M) by 45%. And these are not launch-spike numbers: the measurement window opens 22 months after launch, in the platform’s second and third production years. 60% of sessions today are engaged sessions.

The search monoculture is broken, too. In 2022, roughly nine in ten visits depended on Google. In the latest measured year, organic search accounts for 61% of sessions — still the largest door, but no longer the only one — and nearly three in ten visits arrive direct: readers who come to bianet on their own. For an independent newsroom, readers who type the address themselves are the difference between traffic and an audience. The English edition alone now serves 1.2 million views a year.

Volume, depth and distribution are the measures that compare like-for-like across the platform change, so they are what this page claims; per-language readership is tracked separately.

Measurement footnote (methodology): 2021–22 figures are Universal Analytics; 2025–26 figures are GA4 with datacenter/bot traffic excluded (country-level filter; the conservative choice — unfiltered GA4 would show +142% on views). Views↔pageviews are directly comparable, and the depth row divides pageviews by sessions under both systems’ definitions; user metrics and channel shares differ slightly by definition between UA and GA4, so we compare totals and rounded shares, not decimals.

A decade-plus partnership

The platform is the flagship of a longer relationship: since 2015 I’ve designed and delivered 40+ projects for bianet — among them Atölye BİA (training platform, 2022), the Bianet Journalism Libraries (2019), the Media Ownership Monitor with Reporters Without Borders, the male-violence monitoring database, newsletters, campaign sites, apps and a shelf of print. A newsroom keeps coming back for over a decade for the same reason readers do: the work holds up.

I take on a small number of product-design engagements — research-driven platform work, design systems, and strategy for content-heavy products. Get in touch.