We’re very happy to announce that we’ve been shortlisted for the Digital Impact Awards Best Online Newsroom award 2023 for our work with the John Lewis Partnership media centre. 
We have won Gold previously at the Digital Impact Awards with our work on the DFS and Luton Airport media centres in 2020 and 2021, and we’re keeping our fingers crossed for another win with our John Lewis media centre.  

We have provided online newsrooms for the John Lewis and Waitrose brands since 2014 and both sites have been very successful. In March last year we were asked to create a new website that combined the Waitrose and John Lewis websites and would also now incorporate a newsroom solution for the parent brand, John Lewis Partnership.  

The new, all-inclusive site would need to be easily navigable by media and contain press releases, image libraries and video, but would also need to maintain the different brand values of each of the three separate brands.

We produced a number of different demos for the teams at John Lewis Partnership, including what we thought was a radical solution using tabs to switch between the brands. After some discussion, John Lewis Partnership, John Lewis and Waitrose agreed on this as the solution they liked the most. 

The tabbed solution provides a consistent look across the different brands for media using the site. The media can quickly see the latest news, imagery, videos and social media feeds for each brand, but, crucially, these look sufficiently different to highlight the different brands, so it is obvious which brand the site assets are from.  

We started work on the site mid-April 2022. Designs were signed off mid-May and build work was completed by mid-June and the new combined John Lewis/Waitrose/John Lewis Partnership site launched at the end of July 2022. The new site has surpassed expectations and has been a success for the three John Lewis Partnership brands and is liked by the media using it.

About PressArea 
PressArea is part of PRShots, a small business with a 23-year track record of building solutions for fashion and homeware businesses such as Next, Marks & Spencer, Oliver Bonas and Primark. PressArea was created 10 years ago to create bespoke online newsroom solutions for clients outside of the fashion and homeware space and has created and hosted media centres for many clients including Heathrow, DFS, Aer Lingus, Iberia, British Airways, Marriott EMEA, Waitrose and John Lewis.