100 Days of Holiday
For the past two years, CNET has run an initiative on site called 84 Days to give users access to gift guides, deals, and more throughout the 84 day period from October through December. In 2024, CNET expanded this initiative, and built a new experience in house, titled it 100 Days of Holiday.
- ROLELead Senior Product Designer
- TOOLSFigma
- TEAMSenior Product Designer, Creative Director, Product Manager, Engineering Team, SEO Analysts, Editorial Team, Integrated Marketing Team, Sales Team
- PROJECT LENGTH3 months (6 weeks for design, 6 weeks for for development and QA)
- YEARAugust – October 2024
- BRANDCNET
Project Goals
Create a unique sub-branded experience for CNET’s 100 Days of Holiday that reflects CNET as the place to shop for this year’s most wanted gifts while also prioritizing our authority in gift guides and holiday advice.
Provide users with an experience that allows them to easily shop gifts for the entire family while also prioritizing discoverable content.
Establish monetization opportunities for the business through ad placements, full page sponsorships, sponsored products, and affiliate revenue streams.
Optimize our current Flagship Gift Guide and Gift Guide templates to increase shopability for users and increase authority within SEO traffic streams that will work for both 100 Days of Holiday and evergreen content.
Beginning Phases
Kicking off this project, the creative director and I knew that branding was going to be an important part of the experience. We began with defining a logo, color palette, and determining an overall structure of the flashship gift guide through competitive research and stakeholder conversations.
Refining 100 Days of Holiday
Once a brand direction and overall strategy was determined, I began to refine the flagship gift guide experience. The challenge here was to prioritize a shopping experience while also featuring new holiday content and gift guides throughout the experience in unique and discoverable ways.
Go To Market
One of the larger business goals for this new experience was to be able to sell the experience to partners. To do this, we created a working prototype for our sales team to use during pitches so parters could get a sense of the experience before it was built.
Final 100 Days of Holiday Design
The final designs of the flagship gift guide featured custom video headers, featured content within the hero, filterable products with multiple purchasing options, numerous sponsorship and advertisement opportunities, and discoverable content all within the 100 Days of Holiday Branding. The new gift guide templates carried through the 100 Days of Holiday branding with the color palette and similar components like the product cards.
Evergreen Gift Guide Template
Keeping the same structure, the evergreen versions of these templates consisted of stripping out the holiday branding and replacing font styles and colors with global site styles.
Engineering Handoff
For the engineering handoff, I separated the two page templates on their own pages. Then, for each template I had both the holiday version and the evergreen version of the templates. I also provided detailed notes for each component and the breakdown of screen sizes. One of the more challenging elements to break down was the product cards. They had very specific height minimum and maximums based on product name. I provided rules around how they should flex and where content should become truncated.
Business Impact & Learnings
Overall this project proved to be a huge success. Not only were we able to bring the 100 Days of Holiday experience onto an in-house template, but it also surpassed our overarching business goals. From a monetization perspective, we doubled our revenue from 2023 with over $2M in revenue by mid November. From a performance perspective, the new templates consistently outperformed the year prior in both page views and interaction rates. SEO entries on gift guides were up over 400% vs 2023 and the flagship gift guide was up over 300% in page views vs 2023.