Secure Enterprise CMS for Media Company
Overview
The client wanted to redesign their website to make it more user-friendly for their diverse user base. QAT developed a site that supports traffic spikes, resolves security issues, and increased traffic to the site.
Project Description
The client wanted to redesign their website to make it more user-friendly for their diverse user base. The updated site’s primary goals included the ability to support large amounts of content, media, concurrent users, extensive downloads, and an integrated newsletter. It was also important that the solution could easily handle reorganizing the content as topical trends changed, enable easy content updates, and support large numbers of photos per page. Having experienced a number of security issues with their current site, improving overall site security was a primary concern.
The Solution
A WordPress-based solution was designed and developed in two months. The development time included creating a new visual design, rebranding existing materials and images, and creating a new home page and category pages. Existing content was imported, reformatted, and reorganized to meet the latest trends in user searches for the content.
A key focus of the redesign was to make the site mobile-friendly as most of the site’s users accessed it on some type of mobile device. A responsive layout, category pages that highlight high-interest content, and a reorganized menu for easy mobile navigation were used to improve mobile usability. The new design is highly visual, particularly on the home page. A newsletter widget and recent posts widget were added to the sidebars to improve visitor engagement and retention across devices.
- Uses a commercial theme from a third-party developer, free and paid plugins, and the WordPress core software.
- Manages gated downloads with a user-friendly forms program.
- Supports over 1900 content pages and 5,000 media items.
- Integrates with a third-party newsletter program.
- Utilizes extensive organic SEO.
- Can be easily updated by the company’s staff.
- Performs well on a shared WordPress hosting account.
The redesigned site supports significant traffic spikes in a shared hosting environment without experiencing the outage issues found in the previous setup. The security issues the site had previously experienced were resolved.
Visitor engagement with site content, the number of comments on articles, and conversion rate on gated downloads significantly increased after the visual redesign. Overall, the site experienced a 16% increase in new users, an 18% increase in sessions, and a 19% increase in page views in the year following the redesign.
