Times Internet redesigns MensXP.com

With the new design, the portal has increased its focus on visuals and has introduced new advertising units keeping the contextual advertiser in mind.

MensXP.com, the online men's lifestyle portal owned by Times Internet, has redesigned its look and launched a host of new features that can be incorporated in the day to day lives of Indian men. Started three years ago as India's first online men's lifestyle destination, the portal claims to now carry new lifestyle content that focuses on matters Indian men deem useful, entertaining and relevant.

The new website, the company claims, helps men be better men. Users come to the site with varying interests - some want to lose weight, some want to know how to get their partners to stop nagging, some dream of starting their own company, while others who simply want to get the latest style trends.

To cater to these information needs of the people, the new MensXP tries to address over 40 communities with relevant content on the site right now. Some of the popular content categories include entrepreneurship, break-ups, body building, weight loss, and style trends. Users can simply follow any of these communities and get related content updates every day.

Besides, with the new design, the portal has also increased its focus on visuals with large high resolution images that dominate the design.

Speaking to afaqs! about the objective behind the redesign, Angad Bhatia, ‎founder and business head, MensXP.com, says, "This question reminds me of an old Nike ad which says 'somehow we've come to believe that greatness is reserved for the chosen few...for the superstars, but the truth is: greatness is for all of us.......greatness is wherever somebody is trying to find it.' And that's precisely what we were after - greatness. For the longest time we have benchmarked ourselves against the best designed websites like USAToday, Airbnb and AskMen, and we have derived our inspiration from various sources. This time we wanted to be different. We wanted to build something truly unique."

Bhatia further states that MensXP has great content, and wanted to build the best possible experience around it - a new benchmark for the industry. So is there a change in the content strategy too?

"Twenty thousand manly advice articles later, MensXP still cares about the experience of users and the major change here is that our content will now be as much optimised for social media, as it is for the search engines. Another important part of our content strategy is to make all our articles very immersive. Large high resolution images and serving only relevant content are some of the aspects that formulate our content strategy," he adds.

The new MensXP is also built for native content advertising and this is a fundamental leap the portal has made at a product level. Two of the most important aspects for advertisers, beyond reach and engagement, are the environment (positioning) and the emotion of the ad. "We only wanted to build high impact advertising opportunities and took a lot of inspiration from high quality premium print magazines. MensXP ad units are built for maximum share of voice and high impact," he informs.

In November 2012, Times Internet acquired MensXP following which, the MensXP team joined Times Internet, and Angad Bhatia, founder of the company, started to serve as the business head of the unit.

"It's been about eight months now since we joined Times Internet, and we've been really happy with the results so far. We are the largest in the men's lifestyle space in India as per comScore, having crossed the reach of AskMen - our global competition in this space, and for a long time, we benchmarked ourselves against them."

Speaking about the brand's mobile strategy, Bhatia mentions that the new website presents content with a consistent feel across all platforms, whether it's on the desktop, a smartphone or a tablet. Currently, over 30 per cent of the website's overall traffic comes from mobile devices, he adds. According to comScore, the site, till March 2013, has been garnering about four to five million page views a month.