Improved Digital Publishing Options for a Luxury Travel Media Brand

The Goal

Our client had a website build on Drupal 6 which it wanted to upgrade to Drupal 7 to solve the issues related to SEO and security. They also wanted a new design to be implemented that would be mobile friendly as well as enable flexible and state-of-the-art digital advertising options.

The Solution

• We were contracted to handle this project of migration to Drupal 7 as well as implementing the new design for the website. This also involved integration with ad networks, enabling the right rendering for mobile formats and custom development to enable new advertising options via Drupal. We followed the agile methodology for this development.
• Our team worked as a thought partner for the organization and gave valuable inputs to them during the course of the development. Our client developed the designs for the online and mobile formats. We reviewed these designs and recommended changes that would enable resue of modules for later projects that the team wanted to implement. We gave inputs to bring in consistency in user experience across devices.
• We also recommended changes in areas that industry best practices could be implemented on the their website.
• The website is responsive and mobile friendly thus ensuring that their growing mobile readership and ad revenues get a further boost. We ensured that the site would not only render very well on various screen sizes, but also on non-standard sizes as well.

Features to help the editorial team
With the earlier implementation, the client's editorial team needed to create 4-5 versions of the same story so that it could be published on different pages, or go for syndication. We enabled the process to let them do this with one version using nodequeue.
With new content types introduced, the editors can now bundle content under one topic or theme and easily promote it without having to disturb the main menu, or depend on the tech team to implement it.

New features to improve reader engagement
The redesign of the website was to increase reader traffic and engagement. The new site has a new, trendy tiled layout using large images.
Readers now not only get the option to share a link, but also images and even quotes from a story. And if they find a story through a listing, they can share it right from the listing and don’t even have to click to the story page.

An array of advertising options
Ad management was a key requirement of our client. Their team needed various options to serve ads depending on the kind of content being consumed by readers online.

• We customized Drupal to work with Doubleclick for Publishers, the ad-serving platform used by our client.
• Our client wanted parallax ads to be implemented. Parallax scrolling creates an illusion of depth in a 2D environment, thus giving a different user experience.
• Another requirement was to have overlay graphics to promote ads and content. These are served to a visitor only once in 24 hours. The visitor can thus see the message or ad without considering it an annoyance.
• Our client also wanted to have themes around topics which would essentially work as tags on a website. Themes aggregate all the content of a topic on one page. Having content presented as themes as well as a separate page enables them to serve different ads to the same page.
• They also now has a tile takeover ad option, that allows ads to appear as a small graphic and takeover more space fluidly on click or mouseover.
• The website now has an option to create a home-page like page for sponsors who might want to get associated with specific content and have only their ads on display on that page.
• Multiple pageviews on a slideshow are enabled to get see better impressions for ads.

Migration without changing old URLs

• Usually a Drupal 6 to D7 migration is fairly simple if it does not involve a structure change. In this project, a structure change was needed to enable improved taxonomy and creation of content types.
• Another challenge was to maintain the existing URLs so that visitors who may have bookmarked the site would not end up with missing content. We wrote scripts to enable automatic redirects to the right pages on the new website.
• The images on the old website had captions in various formats. We migrated them to the new website as well. The new website has a specific field for this now to ensure consistency.
• The new Drupal 7 website is hosted on Acquia Cloud.