A new corporate website for Nine: Australia’s largest media company
After the historic merger of Fairfax Media, and facing an ambitious timeline before the annual upfronts, Nine Entertainment needed a new corporate website to reflect the direction of the brand and a unified message.
The Challenge
Building a foundation for agility and flexibility
With only 8 weeks to launch Phase 1 of Nine’s new website, the site’s foundation needed to be flexible and durable enough to accommodate the inevitable strategic and technical changes in the future.
The Code Company worked iteratively with the internal Nine design team who were also facing tight timelines and managing a range of stakeholders. Our development team were able to collaborate and code sections of the site as they were approved internally.
The Code Company provided a reliable, fast-paced service and adapted to our needs as the project progressed.
The website has become our central communication hub for multiple stakeholders across the business, and the site has given us the flexibility to adapt as our needs change.
Luke Robinson, Director of Trade Marketing Nine Entertainment Group
Sitecore migration to WordPress
Nine’s legacy site had been developed internally using Sitecore. The CMS stored decades of content such as blog posts and media releases.
One of Sitecore’s advantages is its flexible data schema. Unfortunately, when working on older sites, that schema can change as you go further back through the records.
To ensure data integrity and the loss of metadata in the content migration, The Code Company mapped all the Sitecore fields and changes from the data exports provided.
Developing a data model for a complex media business
Nine is a highly sophisticated media organisation with businesses in Radio, Television, Digital Publishing and more.
To ensure the website’s backend was easy to use, we carefully mapped out an intuitive new data structure.
In addition to portfolio management, three advertising sites were consolidated into a single, new and easy-to-use site where advertisers can find everything in one place.
Enterprise WordPress integrations with internal systems
The new website needed to seamlessly connect to Nine’s internal systems and APIs.
In addition to revising the content and custom taxonomy structure, we built custom WordPress integrations that:
- Enable shareholders to find important trading information
- Connect and synchronise numerous custom APIs that power real-time stock trading information (including announcements from the stock market)
A page builder that balances bespoke functionality and flexibility
Building products with so many bespoke and highly customised integrations can be a challenge.
If too much complexity is added to a site, constant development work is required to manage future content changes.
To empower Nine’s in-house team and reduce their reliance on external developers, The Code Company leveraged the Beaver Builder WordPress page builder.
The introduction of this customised tool means the team now has full creative control over certain sections of the website, while other parts are kept locked-down to manage risk and performance.
