Nexstar migrating local station sites over to new design

Nexstar Media Group has been in the process of rolling out a new look for its station websites.

The looks appear to have started rolling out in late winter and early spring of 2022, with different stations debuting the new look at different times. 

The header bar remains similar on most sites, with station branding in the center of the header, with the option to change color on a per-status basis. Some stations continue to include a cityscape or other imagery in the upper right corner, where current weather conditions have been moved to.

The weather’s old position, in the upper left, is now dedicated to a “Live now” module. The sites’ primary navigation has been reworked slightly to be full width on larger devices.

Perhaps the most significant change is that the top portion of most pages is now black instead of white, a look that’s similar to CBSNews.com and CBS-owned local station sites that are moving over to the cbsnews.com domain.

The headlines have been switched over to Source Serif Pro, an open source font, that has some visual similarities to Publico, the serif CBSNews.com uses prominently and that’s also used on various NBC News Digital properties. 

Body copy, meanwhile, uses Source Sans Pro, the sans serif sister of the headline font. 

In markets where Nexstar controls two or more stations, typically through agreements with Mission Broadcasting, station websites typically don’t use a domain name that’s specific to one of the stations.

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For example, NBC affiliate WBRE and CBS affiliate WYOU in the Scranton/Wilkes-Barre, Pennsylvania market use PAHomepage.com (Nexstar owns WBRE outright and runs WYOU for Mission). Its Central New York stations use CNYHomepage.com — with Fox affiliate WFXV and MyNetworkTV affiliate WPNY-LD being Nexstar’s and ABC affiliate WUTR being Mission-owned.

Other stations use more traditional domains using their call letters or other branding.

Based on the URL structures of assets used on the pages, it appears the sites are still using WordPress.

Nexstar’s national cable news offering NewsNation also appears to use WordPress, though it has not updated to a new design — but it notably never shared designs with the company’s local stations.