Overview
Exigence implemented an extensive redesign of the IEEE Spectrum website. IEEE Spectrum is:
”...the flagship publication of the IEEE, the world’s largest professional technology association. It is a monthly magazine for technology innovators, business leaders, and the intellectually curious. Spectrum explores future technology trends and the impact of those trends on society and business.” (source)
Problem
The Spectrum Online was already a successful website, attracting over 200,000 visitors/month.
However, Susan Hassler, the Spectrum Editor-in-Chief (bio) had ambitious goals:
- Increasing online readership—doubling from 200,000/month to 400,000/month
- Increasing online ad revenue—as much as possible
- Streamlining the publishing process—in the old system a dedicated web team manually translated the Quark-based articles into HTML and transferred the files via FTP to the public website
Instead of relying on IEEE’s internal IT staff, Susan turned outside to Fergus O’Daly Associates, an interactive design firm with extensive marketing experience, to bring new marketing strategies to the table.
Fergus O’Daly Associates in turn subcontracted the implementation of the new site to Exigence to bring new technical strategies to the table.
Solution
Marketing
Fergus O’Daly Associates developed a comprehensive marketing strategy for Spectrum Online, including:
- Providing all content for free to maximize ad exposure
- Previously most content was “members-only”, and even with a free registration process, this inconvenience drives away potential readers
- Now users would be prompted with a very minimal registration form, but only after 3 separate visits to the site—this compromise lowers initial viewer inconvenience, hopefully selling them on the content’s value before asking them to register, while still gathering demographics to aid marketing clients
- Adding a blog, podcasts, webcasts, and polls as “sticky” content to bring visitors back
- Previously visitors only had reason to come back once-a-month when the new content corresponding to the newsstand issue is released
- Increasing the number of ads-per-page
- Allowing companies to “sponsor” various site features (like print preview, etc.)
Technical
Exigence tackled the technical aspects of the project:
- A Vignette-based portal solution
- Use of the Vignette Portal product was a technical requirement of the IEEE IT staff—as a department-wide mandate, all new IEEE websites must use Vignette. This was a challenge as the Spectrum Online site is an online magazine, not a portal—see our article Portals Considered Harmful for more discussion.
- As a consequence of this portal software misuse, Exigence built a lightweight framework around Vignette to meet the customer’s requirements of clean URLs and page-like functionality (traditional portals have no “page” but are composed of many individually-navigated “mini-pages” in their own boxes)
- Integration with Gauss via web services and file sharing
- Gauss is a legacy content management solution that, by IT mandate, must be used to store all web-related article content
- Web services are used to synchronize workflow between the two systems—e.g. when a user edits content in Gauss, a web service call lets the new website now there is a “staging” version of the article being worked on
- Previewable issues
- Editors and writers are able to “preview” next month’s content (articles, news, etc.) exactly as it will appear to the public before actually promoting it to the live site
Results
- The new site successfully went live in September 2005
- The client was very pleased with Exigence’s implementation of requirements like clean URLs, easy promotion of content, etc.
- The readership and advertising goals are still being met as the Spectrum Online staff works with advertisers and promotes their new site
Next Steps
- Finer-grained advertising and sponsorship functionality to diversify and increase the opportunities for Spectrum Online advertisers to reach readers
- InDesign auto-deployment
- Although the Spectrum Online web team now has much less manual overhead to publishing, they still must manually translate Quark-based articles into XML files (using an IEEE IT-adopted DTD previously developed by Mulberry Technologies)
- In 2006, Spectrum is moving to Adobe InDesign, which natively uses an XML file format. Preliminary brainstorming indicates Fergus O’Daly Associates and Exigence will be asked to help automatically translate these InDesign XML files to the Mulberry-developed DTD and remove the final manual steps in the Spectrum Online publication process.
Statistics
- 5 dev months
- 10,000 Lines of Code
- 66 LOC/day
Take Aways
- We work well with internal IT people, bringing in new ideas and technologies, while still collaborating on requirements and deployment strategies to ensure solutions fit well into existing IT investments
- We strive to deliver the best technical & business solution (e.g. short URLs) where others would compromise