When Hearst Corporation wanted to construct a new headquarters on its New York property, it did not build just another midtown skyscraper. It built one of the greenest, most unique towers in the world, drawing upon modern design and architectural innovations.
The company took a similar approach to its new corporate website, which launched Monday morning.
The term "corporate website" usually conjures images of purposefully boring websites meant to convey as little information as possible to the few people who need it — namely journalists and investors.
Hearst's new website mirrors its building - modern and efficient to an almost unnecessary degree. The site is fully responsive, providing an almost identical look and feel on desktop, tablet or mobile devices. Hearst hand picked Code and Theory to build the site (full disclosure: Code and Theory also built Mashable.com).

The old (left) and new (right) versions of Hearst's website.
The site is a highly functional exercise in native self-promotion. A quick run down the page presents a near-seamless mix of news about Hearst and stories from Hearst publications. The site's back end features a mix of personal curation and automation that let just two people populate a variety of pages from the 15 daily newspapers, more than 300 magazines and 29 television stations, not to mention its stakes in companies like A&E, ESPN and BuzzFeed.
Traditional media is still important to Hearst, but it is far from the company that William Randolph Hearst built from the San Francisco Examiner into one of the most powerful media enterprises of the 20th century.
"We're still a magazine company, which is what we really are known for in New York City, but we're very much a television company," said Hearst chief communications officer Debra Shriver. "We're very much a cable company. We're an incubator and a holding company. We invest in start ups. We're a medical company. We are an international global media player. So we're all those things so the challenge for us as a privately held company is to be transparent and showcase state of the art technology as the delivery of telling the story of who we are."
That reality is evident in the shift in the company's profit centers in the past 35 years. In 2013, Hearst revenue was around $10 billion, enough to put it in league with some of the larger public media companies like Liberty Interactive and Thomson Reuters. And, as Fortune noted in a November feature on the company, Hearst earnings have grown by 78% since 2009.

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The site might seem excessive for a company that would rather drive traffic to its media websites. After all, users seeking to access Cosmopolitan will go to www.cosmopolitan.com.
But with a reputation for corporate style and in need of a site that could handle anything from fashion photos to news on a ratings agency to medical technology announcements, Hearst decided to launch a site that rivals anything else in its network.

"We chose Code and Theory, a leader in building news sites, because we wanted to transform Hearst.com into a real media news destination. That's exactly what we launched today," said Paul Luthringer, vice president of communications at Hearst.

Hearst's new site allows for flexibility to create simple feeds for news or visually rich pages for its magazine assets.
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