In an effort to boost online readership, free daily Metro has revamped its MetroNews.ca and JournalMetro.com websites.

The redesigned sites are patterned after parent Metro International’s most successful online property, Metro Sweden, said Jodi Brown, Metro Canada’s interactive director. In addition to improved navigation features and a cleaner design, the new Metro websites also feature the “MetroTube of the Day”—which spotlights a different web video each day—a new blog section that enables readers to link to both national and local blogs, and a new comments feature. Each component will have its own RSS feed.

While Metro’s print product has a significant presence in each of its seven Canadian markets, online readership lags behind that of its rivals. In the most recent readership survey from the Newspaper Audience Databank (NADbank), for example, MetroNews.ca had 50,100 weekly readers in the Toronto market, compared with 64,400 for freebie rival 24 hours. The market leader was the Toronto Star’s website, TheStar.com, with 591,000 weekly readers.

Metro’s print product, however, had an average daily readership of 471,300—second only to the Star’s 929,500.

In Vancouver, MetroNews.ca had 12,800 weekly online readers, compared with 9,400 for 24 hours, while in Montreal, Métro’s French-language site JournalMetro.com had 27,500 weekly online readers, slightly ahead of 24 heures (26,100)but well behind the websites of major dailies likeLa Presse, Le Journal de Montréaland The Gazette.

“It’s just bringing it up to where it needs to be to start matching the success of the print brand,” said Brown.

Metro’s English and French web properties have approximately 225,000 unique visitors and 1.5 million page views a month according to comScore. The goal, said Brown, is to increase the number of unique visitors to one million sometime in 2010.

The revamped websites will be promoted in Metro’s print edition, as well as its approximately 8,000 newspaper boxes across the country.

While there are no new advertising formats around the relaunch, Brown said that Metro’s online editions have adopted their print counterparts’ proclivity for boundary-pushing ads. “Our focus, like in print, is to come up with creative concepts that some of our competitors won’t do,” she said. “As long as it’s not intrusive and it fits with our brand, we might stretch our creativity a little more than other newspaper sites.”

The website redesign was done by Toronto web designer Petros Petrakis, who has previously worked with other media brands including the Family Channel and Teletoon.