Projects

In late 2021 we were contacted by Ian Marland, who we’d worked with years ago in our former journalistic careers.

Ian had since set up his own hyperlocal news site, covering the west end of Glasgow. It was set up as a franchised operation running on some software he didn’t have full control of and he was keen to move to a solution that was more appropriate for his needs.

In particular, the site needed to make really good news of pictures and have excellent social media integration. It was also absolutely critical that it looked and worked great on mobiles, and loaded really quickly too. Ian was keen to revamp the look of the site at the same time, to make it more fresh and striking.

Another key consideration was that the existing archive of more than 1500 articles needed to be brought across and work consistently, with existing addresses pointing to the appropriate story on the new site.

Visit this site

What we did

We built a bespoke news management system for Ian’s site, which puts him in full control. He can add new sections for content, areas, and tags whenever they’re needed. Articles can be listed in multiple sections and can feature different images for the site itself and for social media; the site itself features a “curated” front page for each section, supporting a range of different shapes of pictures, to make it as flexible as possible.

Behind the scenes, the article system we added to our CMS allows Ian to send out preview links to articles when needed and post-date these so they can appear on the site automatically at any time (even appearing in a featured slot on section homepages).

We also built a system to manage adverts to display within the site, allowing these to be specifically shown on any page or only in particular sections (and indeed on specific articles).

We integrated the site with existing social media platforms, showing this content within the news feed on mobile and in a separate column on desktop. On “inside” sections, users can just keep scrolling for as long as they want to see more content, and individual pieces will also feature related content generated from the tags used for the article.

We worked with the previous site’s developers to ensure a smooth transition, getting a copy of the old site’s database to import its content and transferring images across as well.

They said …