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.
Getting Started
Building a foundation for agility and flexibility
With only eight weeks to launch Phase 1 of Nine’s website, future change was inevitable. This meant the foundation needed to be flexible enough to handle the site as its purpose evolved.
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.
Sitecore migration to WordPress
Ensuring data integrity
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 meta data in the content migration, The Code Company mapped all the Sitecore fields and changes from the data exports provided.
“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 as given us the flexibility to adapt as our needs change.”
Luke Robinson, Director of Trade Marketing Nine Entertainment Group
Data mapping
Developing a data model for one of the largest and most complex media businesses in Australia
Nine is a highly sophisticated media organisation with businesses in Radio, Television, Digital Publishing and more. This resulted in a highly complex data structure, which The Code Company carefully mapped out to ensure the back end was intuitive and easy to use.
The end result was a WordPress native solution that allows Nine’s internal team to manage their business unit’s complex structure with ease.
In addtion to portfolio management, three advertising sites were consolidated into a single, new and easy to use site where advertisers can find everything in a one place.
Reason to migrate
Custom WordPress integrations
In addition to the content and custom taxonomy structure, the website required a number of enterprise integrations with Nine’s internal systems in order to:
- Enable shareholder’s to find important trading information
- Connect and synchronise numerous custom APIs that power real-time stock trading information (including announcements from the stock market)
Balancing bespoke functionality with creative flexibility
WordPress page builder
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.
