Bringing BMG's publishing platforms up to date
Tigerfish approached Beat Media Group to advise them that the platform their current site Mancunian Matters was working on was soon to be dropped for security and support patching. As part of this approach Tigerfish provided BMG with an idea of updating both of their daily news publishing platforms with a singular custom theme which could be rebranded to suit each site. This would both provide the sites with a new modern and lightweight theming template on the WordPress platform while also saving development time and money on producing two separately designed websites.
The Client
At its core Beat Media Group provide services all over the journalism sector. One section of their core services is education where they run two Journalism schools in Manchester and London. Their publishing platforms Mancunian Matters and South West Londoner provide a space for both full time journalism staff and journalism students to publish their work to the outside world. The journalism students can then use the stories as part of their portfolio once they make the transition from education to employment.
The Aim
The projects main focus was to take the websites from their current platforms and provide modernisation across the board, not only in terms of aesthetics but in functionality as well. We would do this by creating a custom template which relies less on third party plugins and scripts whilst providing extra flexibility for the client to explore other avenues in the future such as digital magazine style releases and podcasts. The nature of the websites requires that they are updated multiple times a day, so once they ready to go live we also needed to organise how we would export the data from the older platforms to the new.
Another excellent piece of work from the team at Tigerfish…we have used them for years and will continue to do so.James Parsons, Managing Director
The Process
We began the project by having a meeting with the Managing Director James Parsons regarding the requirements for both sites and working out solutions that would resolve current issues in the older sites. Once we had hashed out the requirements the BMG team started working on the new branding for both websites and Tigerfish began looking into the framework development and how best to present the news stories to the visitors of the websites. Once both teams had completed their tasks and bought their work together, it was clear a strong concept had been realised.
Tigerfish then got busy turning these designs into reality, while also researching and testing our import methods for the two sites. The development process went very smoothly and we were able to make sure it featured all of the requirements of the client whilst paying particular attention to the 1000+ lines of HTML 5, CSS3 & Javascript code necessary to fulfil the brief. Our final tasks before going live were to run final tests of the import methods and make sure that the advertisement system on both sites were active and working.
The Results
Once ready to go live we were able to transition both of the websites over including live updates from that morning and get the new websites live within a 2 hour period!
During the transition we applied a maintenance holding page and ensured that disruption from the switch over was keep at an absolute minimum. The Tigerfish team had provided the client with training on the new sites during the development stage allowing the client’s staff and students to start using the new WordPress platform straight away.
Overall the management team at BMG were very happy with the final results and we will continue to work with BMG into the future providing consultancy and functionality changes as and when required.
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