A digital growth project for The Squiz
The Code Company led a complete digital transformation project, overhauling The Squiz’s site design, editorial workflow and the development of new intelligent information architecture.
The Challenge
Make content go further
The Squiz is a publisher that compiles bite-sized news summaries and has ambitious growth plans in Australia
As a newsletter and podcast-first business, shareable content is vital to The Squiz’s commercial success..
However, its original WordPress website utilised none of the features that make WordPress a great choice for publishers. It was essentially an archive of past newsletters, which made it impossible to share individual posts or cross-link to related articles.
Because the site was hard-coded, the in-house team relied on developers to perform even basic tasks such as updating website navigation and creating landing pages.
Creating an intelligent content architecture
Before development could commence, we needed to establish the best way to organise all of The Squiz’s existing content.
Our data engineers performed a detailed content mapping exercise which then enabled us to build a far more connected and intelligent content architecture.
The new architecture allows audiences to search for specific categories of news, listen to related podcasts and easily share stories on social media and email.
The Code Company really gets publishing – and that’s very important to us.
They are our go-to agency for launching new websites.
Transforming archives into shareable articles
In order to transform legacy newsletter content into shareable articles, we first created a visual template featuring clear calls to action. We then migrated all of the content from the newsletter archives into individual posts.
The Squiz’s editorial team can now publish original content as single news articles, and drive new readers to subscribe to the email newsletter.
We’re now able to share our content across social media and use it in campaigns to drive subscribers. Once we get people to the website, they can easily sign up.
Larissa Moore, Director of Engagement The Squiz
Overhauling site design and editorial experience
Throughout the website build, our team worked iteratively with The Squiz’s in-house team. We refreshed site design and UX, and set up a series of custom modules which can easily be used or modified by editorial staff while maintaining brand consistency.
The drag-and-drop tool means the staff are now far less reliant on developers to perform day-to-day tasks, and the marketing and content teams can craft landing pages within minutes.
With greater editorial independence they have more time to focus on new product innovation and audience acquisition.
A small publisher with enterprise editorial and analytics tools
WordPress’s mission is to democratise publishing. Despite having a small team, The Squiz now has capabilities previously only available to media companies with more resources and infrastructure.
The new data capabilities of the website mean that when a new reader signs-up to the newsletter, their preferred content categories are stored in their profile.
Armed with this engagement data, the team can develop new content and personalisation solutions. They can also generate detailed reports to analyse the performance of different news categories in driving audience acquisition.
We’re working towards understanding our audience a lot better. So having the infrastructure and analytics in place to give us maximum understanding of what our audience is doing is critical to our future success.
Larissa Moore, Director of Engagement The Squiz
A platform to launch new verticals
With their new data architecture in place, it’s easy for the team to expand into new verticals.
The Squiz Sport recently launched and a politics vertical of The Sqiuz was created within days for the 2022 federal election.
