Telecoms.com uses WordPress Interconnect IT's extensions and theme technology as a flexible news platform

Overview

When we were approached by Informa Telecoms & Media Ltd (part of Informa plc) about whether WordPress could be used as a fully fledged news platform suitable for replacing their Telecoms.com site, we hesitated, but not for very long.  Following a full analysis of their requirements we were able to confirm that in combination with some of our own technology, plus some new development, we could create a very flexible WordPress based news platform that allowed for excellent productivity for the Telecoms.com team.

Analysis

One of the biggest problems that Telecoms.com had experienced with their previous Java based system was that there was relatively little flexibility built into the system.  Most changes meant going back to the developers with a formal request.  This was both expensive (developers usually are), time consuming and, worst of all, meant that the site could not respond quickly to events in the market place.

What was needed was an ability to create new sections on the site, quickly, without use of expensive development staff.  We had already proven this technology with our Caribou News Theme that we offer freely as a GPL project through our Spectacu.la site, and this helped us to assure the Informa TM team that we were able to match their requirements.

Planning & Design

We worked with the Telecoms.com team initially to supply a range of mock-ups.  However, although they were effective, they weren’t exactly what was wanted by the team.  In order to expedite matters we agreed to work with a third party design agency, Coast Digital, who supplied excellent designs in Fireworks format.  These took some of our ideas and built upon them to create the sophisticated and attractive site that is now visible.

At the same time, we planned the structure of the site and how its framework would allow the client to manage content.  We decided that although the Caribou sections system is useful the full requirements as planned meant that we decided to use a page based widget driven system for the site.  This would allow the client to create pages using the section page template that is part of the theme and this would initiate a series of widget spaces which would become available in the WordPress back-end.  Once available, various standard and custom widgets, appropriately styled, could be dropped in place.

The Sections System

The Interconnect IT category listing plugin in action.

The ability to create sections full of widget spaces is only useful if you have suitable widgets to place there.  One of the biggest parts of the project was creating and styling a wide range of widgets that allowed the site adminstrators to quickly create a new section and populate it with content.  The primary key to this is Interconnect IT’s Category Lister Widget which allows a client to select content according to logical category criteria.  You could have a set of regional categories and a set of format categories and choose items that are in both.

In this case, there are a range of format categories such as News, Opinion and so on, and a continental based region categorisation.  If the client wishes to select content that is news based from America, they simply choose those two categories and any content that matches the criteria will be displayed.

The key advantage to this is that a new section can be created within minutes.  For example, should there be a business need to create a Nokia section, the client could create a category for Nokia, and then select content that is News and Nokia for one widget, Opinion and Nokia for another, and so on.  They then add the navigation to the section using the menu builder plugin we modified for the purpose, and the section becomes ‘live’.  The whole job of creating a Nokia news and information section could be carried it in less than quarter of a section.  For a responsive news site this facility is extremely important.

Getting a new section built would take weeks and was a complicated task. Now we can do it on the fly. It allows us so much more freedom and opportunity to do innovative things, and neatly get rid of stuff that doesn’t work out.

James Middleton, Managing Editor of Telecoms.com on the advantages of the new system.

Plugins

One thing we warn all sites against is something we call ‘pluginitis’ which is where a site owner keeps adding various plugins, some of which may interact with one another in unexpected ways.  We believe that most sites rarely need more than ten or so plugins to function in a way that is suitable for needs.

We supply a set of Interconnect IT only plugins, which add news specific functionality and optimisations to WordPress, such as theme specific image resizing, alternative post titles, category selection, and standfirst capabilities.  These plugins are only available from Interconnect IT for projects that we lead, and are not available through third parties.

We also selected various plugins which were already available in the GPL sphere which added appropriate functionality, such as Lester Chan’s popular WP-Polls Plugin, the Add This social bookmarking plugin, and WordPress Popular Posts amongst others.  All were selected and tested for performance, reliability and quality before being applied.  Other plugins were also used, but most required modification to fulfil their requirements and we expect to feed this code back into the community in due course.

One thing that we never do, and for which there is rarely any need, is to modify the WordPress core.  This helps reduce maintenance issues and costs in the future.

Hosting & Performance

The Telecoms.com site in all its glory, showing the richness of content on the front page - there are many other similar pages on the site

For hosting, systems administration and load testing we worked with Kumina N.L. who have since become a company with which we partner by choice.  They provided a robust four way, load balanced hosting solution and carried out load-testing to ensure the servers were capable of handling peak traffics that can come to any news site.  The infrastructure relies on a Debian based AMP stack and has proven to be extremely robust.

One thing we did learn is that when content is pulled from a third party site (for example, adverts) site loading times can be slowed by factors outside your control.  To resolve this in future implementations of such sites Interconnect IT is in the process of developing post-loading technology which will create a widget that seeks external content only after all other important content has been loaded rather than using the conventional approach of loading content in strict order.

Traffic Growth

Although actual figures for Telecoms.com’s traffic are confidential business information, they have told us that after two months visitor numbers and page views have grown by approximately 30% to 50%, depending on the metrics used.  The analytics suggest that site ’stickiness’ and engagement have increased markedly thanks to the improved design, adoption of threaded comments (allowing for discussions to take place on news), most popular news information, and related content teasers.

WordPress Advantages

WordPress has succeeded in becoming a successful blogging platform over the past six years, but beyond that it has started to show the flexibility of the framework it provides.  The ease of use required by bloggers, coupled with a sophisticated theme and plugin framework has allowed the system to go far beyond its original means.

When good developers mix with WordPress the results can be impressive and help to create professional news sites for budgets that, including development and implementation, often cost less than the traditional CMS systems once used.  As a consequence interest in WordPress has mushroomed significantly.  While interest is still primarily focussed on use of WordPress for blogging platforms, Telecoms.com has shown its power when used as a news platform also.

By comparison [to the previous system], Wordpress is a dream, and the best thing is, less technical users find it intuitive and easy to get along with. As a successful blogging platform you can tell a lot of time and effort has been invested in making it a slick and productive tool, and that translates well when using it as a business CMS too.

James Middleton

Support & Maintenance

Since going live the system has proven to be robust and simple to use.  In fact, it proved so robust that there was no need for an ongoing support contract from us for our code.  This is often the case with our work and we make little money from support – while this may seem like poor business sense, we believe that building for reliability and performance helps us to keep our clients coming back to us time and time again.  We anticipate working with Informa on future projects.

Conclusion

WordPress, coupled with Interconnect IT’s additional technology has led to a strong, high-performance website which has significantly exceeded the expectations of the client.  WordPress has now proven itself as a platform for content far beyond blogging at Informa and we believe they are now likely to use the platform on future projects.  Since then, Interconnect IT has been approached by, and entered into discussions with, a number of other news organisations with a view to developing WordPress usage within their organisations.

Sniff Petrol is an anarchic motor industry and motorsport satire site

Overview

1. Over 120,000 posts viewed per week
2. Well controlled costs
3. High availability
4. Large peaks in traffic handled well when a new ‘edition’ is released
5. Highly responsive site

Analysis

Sniff Petrol is a well known and highly regarded satirical site with its focus on motorsport and the car industry. After six years, however, updating the site had increasingly become something of a chore for the site owner.

At this point friends had recommended producing a blog style site. Unfortunately, creating an attractive and interesting blog theme that moved the design of the site forwards rather than backwards had proved problematic for Sniff Petrol. This is where Interconnect IT were able to become involved, solving a whole raft of problems.

The problems solved can easily be listed:

1. Difficulty in making updates
2. Lack of creative freedom
3. Having to maintain a separate archive page by hand
4. A need for a more modern design that connects with the old site
5. RSS Feeds to allow visitors to keep up with changes to the site
6. Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

We also wanted to make sure that the site could be accessible to the widest range of users possible, using many different platforms.

With these criteria in mind, we created a standard blog layout with floating panels for the content, lying on an orange ‘page’, and with navigation elements shown on the page through cut-out panels. This gives the site a contemporary, layered feel.

Elements on the site are now managed dynamically – so for example, if the owner wishes to create a new category for articles, it won’t appear in the navigation panel until it’s populated with content. Then, if a visitor selects this category, it is highlighted, helping the visitor to know where in the site they’ve found themselves.

The underlying publishing platform is WordPress, a popular blogging and web publishing tool that’s put many millions of websites online. By plugging into its APIs we are able to add extra functionality without causing legacy problems in the future.

WordPress allows a range of blogging functions which help the professional blogger – for example, the ability to post date features means that content can be published automatically once the date has arrived. Useful for embargoed press releases, for example.  This helps Sniff Petrol to batch output up ready for editions, which is the working method preferred for the site.

Other useful facilities include the ability to assign posts to different ‘users’ – on Sniff Petrol a users like Crazy Dave Coulthard, D.I. Blundell and Carcoat Damphands have been defined, and posts can then be written with them as the author.

Traffic Improvement

In order to deal with the greater technical requirements of the new site, as well as ensuring higher availability and regular backups, it was decided to move everything on to Interconnect IT’s servers. The initial load was high, with over 6,000 visitors per day within just a few days. People around the world quickly learned that there was a new version of the site and traffic climbed exponentially at first. A sudden increase in traffic can sometimes be disastrous to a blog, but our well specified server barely noticed the change.

Overall, with like-on-like comparisons, the site has seen an increase in visits by over 100% – measured in the short term. It’s likely that due to the more regularly updated content that, in the long term, the site’s traffic will grow considerably.

Months Later…

Site traffic continued to climb, and is now steadily at 600% over the original visitor levels. This meant some tweaking to maintain server performance and keep bandwidth bills reasonable. This huge increase in visitors has happened because not only is the site updated more regularly than before, it’s also easier to keep track off – there are 3,000 visits a day from RSS readers alone.

In 2009…

The site is continuing to perform and grow. Sniff Petrol’s use of Twitter, coupled with a Twitter widget in the sidebar, has helped bring the site to a new audience. Updates ended up going back to a monthly basis, but the ease of use with WordPress means that the site’s owner continues to enjoy posting to it on a regular basis.

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 331 5140 (+44 151 331 5140 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

A visually sophisticated site, delivered in record time

Overview

Politics & The City is a multi-blog WordPress MU based site where a large number of contributors have created an online news system aimed at the female market.  The site needed to be implemented in a short period of time, with no room for delays due to the already planned and paid for publicity campaign.

Analysis

For a change, a site where didn’t carry out the visual design ourselves. Instead we were supplied mock-ups and a basic design brief from Black & Ginger, which we then turned into a living, breathing, news website using our WordPress skills to help make a dynamic site easy to manage even for staff who were new to content managed websites.

Key problems solved in the creation of Politics & The City can easily be listed:

1. Performance – the site will be expected to receive large spikes in traffic
2. Ease of expansion
3. Ease of use and content management
4. High standards of presentation
5. Ease of control over the site’s features
6. Highly demanding implementation schedule (three weeks!)
7. Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

It quickly became apparent that the best way forward would be a WordPress MU site, with a custom portal theme and then other themes with shared elements to be used elsewhere in the site. Cost was an issue as it was the first significant online project for June Sarpong MBE, the lady behind the site.

Hosting Challenges

The first major issue to deal with was the unusual server requirements. The clients had already made a deal with SUN (with their Startup Essentials package) prior to approaching Interconnect IT. As a consequence, the WordPress MU install had to be on a Solaris AMP stack, rather than the more usual Linux based stack we deal with. However, apart from a couple of initial hiccups, we quickly solved the problems and moved on to the install.

Rapid Yet Sophisticated Development

At the same time, development was moving quickly. We built and created a range of themes all of which added functionality. The portal itself was largely widget driven, and the different sites had writing options that allowed the user to specify whether the content should appear on the front page or not. If so, the theme would create suitably sized image variants for the front page, and then apply a suitable mask. Easy and simple for the writers to understand.

With deadlines so short, we had to rely on our accumulated IP, which helped us create something more than most rivals could manage. Being WordPress specialists helped hugely. In the end, we crafted the basis for a major site. And when the site was linked to from simply everywhere on the first day, the software performed admirably – only troubled by slow DNS propagation and caching issues which are typical problems when a site is given a big launch just hours after going live.

Key Learning Points

1. The actual hosting for the site was probably overspecified for the requirements, but we weren’t involved in this decision.  We would say that for the traffic experienced by the site a typical commodity based dedicated server, perhaps with a front-end cache, is perfectly adequate.  Our own server attracts approximately the same amount of traffic but is a relatively basic machine in comparison.  However, the SUN based solution does allow for a great deal of future traffic.  Our own view is that for single sites, server migrations are relatively straightforward and most sites could do with saving money on their serving solutions.

2. The designs were supplied as Adobe Illustrator files, but as high resolution 300dpi files.  Screens run at much lower resolutions (typically 72dpi-105dpi) and consequently all the graphics had to be recreated by us, so adding considerably to our workload.  Designers should try to work with Adobe Fireworks or, failing that, Photoshop or Illustrator in pixel modes.

3. Three weeks is not quite enough time for a project with this much custom work and required 14hr working days, seven days a week, in order to provide the results as requested.

4. For most smaller projects a lot of time and money can be saved by using ready-prepared dedicated servers from companies such as Namesco, as opposed to bare-box solutions from high-end companies.  Bare box solutions, whilst flexible and easy to work with for experts, require high quality systems administration and this is a service we do not provide.  Consequently, the need to recruit a systems administrator with specific skills can sometimes be expensive.

5. Developers don’t always get any of the credit…but they’re tucked away in the CSS files, if you know where to find them!

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 331 5140 (+44 151 331 5140 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.