The Armenian Mirror-Spectator is the first English-language Armenian weekly newspaper in the United States, serving the Armenian-American community for over 86 years. It publishes across seven core categories – Armenia & Karabakh, Arts & Culture, Opinion, Community, International, Genocide, and Recipes – alongside a weekly print edition, an events calendar for the wider Armenian diaspora community, and reader subscriptions.
The Challenge
A weekly newspaper with an 86-year publishing history carries a different kind of technical weight than a typical business site: decades of archives that need to stay findable, a high volume of new articles published continuously across many overlapping categories and tags, a print edition that still needs a home online alongside the digital-first content, and a community events calendar that functions almost as its own product. The site also needed to keep serving a legacy of trust and recognition in the community while modernizing the reading experience.
Unlike a typical redesign where content volume is modest and mostly evergreen, this one required a structure that could hold up under constant daily publishing without the homepage or category pages degrading into clutter.
Our Approach
We treated the redesign as an information-architecture problem first, design problem second. With content spanning breaking news, opinion columns, community obituaries and event listings, book reviews, and a weekly recipe feature, the priority was making sure each type of content had a clear home and a clear visual hierarchy – trending and most-viewed rankings, a distinct “This Week” designation for current content, and category-specific modules that could surface recent posts without requiring an editor to manually curate the homepage every day.
The Solution
Technical build:
1. Full WordPress theme and template rebuild across the homepage, category archives, and single-article templates
Structured category system (Armenia & Karabakh, Arts & Culture, Opinion, Community, International, Genocide, Recipes) with dedicated modules per section on the homepage
2. Trending / Most Viewed / Most Commented rotating widget to surface popular content without manual curation
3. Print edition integration – current issue download and a browsable past-issues archive, keeping the physical newspaper’s presence alongside the digital site
4. Community events calendar with public submission (readers can add their own events), serving diaspora communities well beyond any single city
5. Subscription and weekly email signup flows integrated directly into the homepage
6. Full-text archive access preserving decades of published articles in a structure that stays searchable and organized as new content is added daily
Why It Matters
For a publication with this much institutional history, a redesign isn’t just an aesthetic refresh – it’s making sure decades of archived reporting, a loyal subscriber base, and a daily publishing cadence all keep working smoothly under one modern structure, without losing what long-time readers already trust about the paper.
