How Australia’s biggest youth publisher replatformed for rapid growth
Primed for rapid expansion after an initial investment from Nine, Pedestrian needed a publishing platform and technology partner that could keep pace with their growth.
The Challenge
Future-proofing a site with rapid mobile growth
With desktop traffic stable, but mobile facing 100% growth year-over-year, Pedestrian needed a publishing platform that was built for the future.
The website had to be mobile-first and able to scale for the high traffic that the publishing company was starting to experience.
Pedestrian’s existing CMS was unable to meet the editorial team’s requirements and the increasingly complex needs of advertisers.
Pedestrian was originally custom-built, requiring significant ongoing development, costs, time & resources to update.
A dramatic increase in traffic, ad trafficking & editorial requirements resulted in an urgent need to overhaul our platform.
Oscar Martin, Co-founder Pedestrian.tv
Unlocking editorial innovation with WordPress
Pedestrian receives over 10M page views per month. Editorial excellence is vital to its success.
By moving to WordPress, the editorial team was able to immediately take advantage of the user-friendly publishing platform.
The Code Company fully customised the WordPress setup to align with Pedestrian’s unique editorial structure and workflows. This involved differentiating a variety of content types and production calendars within a single system.
Pedestrian’s old CMS included many custom-developed features which made it harder to use and easier to break. These same editorial features are standard inclusions in the WordPress CMS.
Personalised content and flexible AdTech
The Code Company created a sophisticated API that personalises content based upon a complex set of behavioural data.
Our ad tech engineers also developed a significantly more flexible, easier-to-use and faster AdTech system using Google Ad Manager.
This new solution enables multiple Pedestrian departments to control and target specific campaigns to single articles or series of articles within the CMS.
Advanced logic was developed to ensure advertising conflicts were avoided and easily managed by the editorial team.
Large-scale real time data migration of legacy content
We designed and engineered a live API service that could export content and data from Pedestrian’s old custom CMS and translate it all into a WordPress format.
Due to the fragmented nature of how content was stored, the data migration was incredibly complex. This meant there were constant refinements through an iterative process, that accounted for older content.
- 50,000+ articles
- 90,000+ users
- 300,000+ media assets
- 80,000+ job listings
Custom jobs board functionality
A jobs board is a great way to monetise the niche audience of speciality publishers like Pedestrian.tv
The Code Company created a highly customised jobs board that uses WordPress for basic underlying technology, and custom code to create sophisticated personalisation functionality.
The Pedestrian jobs board manages 40,000+ daily job alerts and 45,000+ new job opening alerts. See how we solved the the technical challenges of sending bulk personalised emails in WordPress.
WordPress and Angular were used to deliver an optimal experience both on desktop and mobile devices. And we worked with their in-house designer to develop the backend and frontend functionality.
Automating the job alert process has helped Pedestrian grow in reach and relevance. The simplified processes means the editorial team and end users are able to add and manage postings more efficiently than ever before.
