How Australia’s biggest youth publisher, Pedestrian.tv replatformed their website for rapid growth
Primed for rapid expansion after an initial investment from Nine Entertainment, Pedestrian needed a publishing platform and technology partner that could keep pace with their growth in the Australian youth arena.
THE CHALLENGE
A Critical Milestone in Pedestrian’s Growth
With desktop traffic stable, but mobile facing 100% growth year on year, Pedestrian needed a publishing platform that was built for the future. The website had to be mobile-first, responsive and able to scale for the high traffic that the publishing company was starting to see.
As Pedestrian’s existing CMS was unable to meet the editorial team’s requirements, a move to WordPress was a must. And in order to meet the increasingly complex needs of advertisers, their ad tech also needed to be modernised.
“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”
Pedestrian.tv
A scalable new publishing platform
Editorial efficiencies in WordPress
Pedestrian receives over 10,000,000 page views per month.
By moving to WordPress, their 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.
DATA-LED PUBLISHING SOLUTIONS
Personalised content and flexible ad tech
The Code Company created a sophisticated API that personalises content based upon a complex set of behavioural data.
We also developed a significantly more flexible, easier-to-use and faster ad tech 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.
COMPLEX DATA MIGRATION
Large-scale real time data migration of legacy content
The Code Company 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 wee constant refinements through an iterative process, that accounted for increasingly older content.
- 50,000+ articles
- 90,000+ users
- 300,000+ media assets
- 80,000+ job listings
A typical content migration often involves freezing all content and performing an export and import process from the old website to the new one.
However, due to Pedestrian’s website size and the structure of their old CMS this process would have taken days. And because the editorial team is constantly publishing new content and editing old content, the migration would also need to continuously re-sync while migrating.
It was that that for a publisher like Pedestrian that relies on timely content, a traditional data migration simply wasn’t an option.
“Improving the performance impact of third-party scripts on a website takes time; results won’t come overnight, but by being patient and chipping away slowly, eventually these efforts will be rewarded.”
Future Women
revenue diversification
Custom jobs board functionality
A jobs board is a great way to monetise the niche audience of speciality publishers.
The Code Company created a highly customed WordPress 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.
