GigaOM Redesign: Speed as a Feature

When GigaOM launched their redesign earlier this year, they impressed us by cutting down their page generation time by more than half – and, they built it in just two months. How? We chatted with Casey Bisson, Director of Engineering at GigaOM to find out.

What spurred the GigaOM redesign?

As one of our product managers has been repeating: speed is a feature. We wanted to preserve the user experience and cut out things that didn’t matter — we wanted to clean up the code with the goal of dramatically improving speed.

Om has been blogging for a long time, and there were a huge number of plugins that were built to support different features over time. Over all those years of blogging, never once did we get a chance to stop and look back and what features we’ve added while growing from a personal blog to a company with lots of authors.

For this redesign, we had a moment – not long – to ask the serious question about each feature: what does it do, and is it worth preserving? We started with the answer to the second question being “no.”

So, how did your team tackle the performance issue?

In the previous 18 months, we had been working on lots of different ways of improving performance without dramatically improving our code base. We went from shamefully bad page load times to slightly worse than average. But to get the remaining performance increase, we had to refactor all of our code. Performance isn’t something you can build on after the fact.

In structuring our theme, a huge amount of time was spent on building for lazy loading. For our site, content is king. So when you load the site, the things you want to read, the content, we get those to your browser first. Then, the things around the content, the part of the site that are business requirements, those are lazy loaded.

What were the biggest offenders on your previous site in terms of page load time?

One of the biggest offenders was our CSS. It had grown to a full megabyte in size, which required a lot of time to download. So by doing the redesign from scratch, we were able to get rid of our old CSS and create new CSS from scratch, and build in optimizations for selectors and markup on the page from the start.

What was the simplest change that you made that affect page load times?

Something that is big picture simple – but took us a while to do – was getting rid of graphics. This brought us a huge win.

The way we got rid of images entirely was to replace graphics with a web font. It partially contributes to the stark look of the page, but all the line art is generated by a web font that saves us quite a bit of download time. The web font itself is very small – all the different characters are different images, like our logo, or the twitter icon. It requires a very different workflow with very different tools, but once we did it, it was amazingly easy to do.

How does one build a high performance WordPress site?

Let WordPress be WordPress and cut away what is not WordPress. WordPress has an incredibly sophisticated architecture, and there are a lot of features that you can add, but when you’re building that way you’re not building for performance. In our redesign, we were getting rid of what what we could.

All of our code, everything that we run on our site, starts out as an independent plugin that runs on baseline WordPress. It means we’re building better plugins that are easier to debug and maintain, in addition to the performance gains we get from going down to baseline WordPress. It also makes it easy to onboard new engineers and distribute individual projects because there’s no dependency between individual plugins.

We also adopted the idea that everything we built would be a candidate for public release. It prevents us from doing something stupid that isn’t maintainable as our site changes – something you wouldn’t be proud of sharing with the WP community – just because it gets the job done.

How has being on WordPress.com VIP improved your site’s performance?

The automatic concatenation of scripts and CSS, the automatic CDN-ing, these are things that come with the VIP platform that we don’t have to manage. If you take a regular WordPress site and you try to scale it up, there’s a lot of setup and configuration to get the concatenated scripts and CSS, and finding a CDN. All that takes time. WordPress.com VIP has been a great value to us in terms of giving us a baseline platform with baseline best practice features available to us, without us having to contract for it to maintain it.

How have your users responded to your redesign?

We’ve definitely gotten some good audience feedback. One of the things we noticed is that the hours people spend on the site have gone into the after-work hours, and there’s been an increase in the after-work usage of the site on mobile devices. That means people are finding the site more comfortable on mobile devices, and that they are taking the site home with them.

Want more? Read Casey’s blog post on Browser Performance Improvements on Code Kitchen.

Or, curious about WordPress for large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

Global News Q&A: The Technology Behind Their Responsive Redesign

GlobalNews.ca is the online news hub for the Global Television Network, a large Canadian broadcasting network with 12 owned-and-operated stations across the country. In March this year, they launched a massive redesign of their site, built on WordPress by 10up and hosted by WordPress.com VIP. The new site consolidated their many local and national sites into one responsively designed site that displays relevant content based on a user’s location. We chatted with Keith Robinson, the manager of digital products at Global News, to learn more about the vision and technology behind this redesign.

What was your team trying to achieve with the GlobalNews.ca redesign?

We were trying to create a news experience that would work really well across any device. We’ve all seen the tremendous growth in mobile and tablets, and we ultimately felt for news consumers that the best thing to do would be a responsive design that works well on any device.

For the homepage, rather than a traditional news site model, we wanted more of a social media experience. We learned that what consumers want is to choose a story that interests them – that they want to browse through a list of stories to choose from rather than a landing page that gives you a few headlines. It’s less of a curated experience, and more of a stream of news. It’s an experience that lets the user choose.

We recognize that there are multiple possible entry points to the site beyond the homepage. So our redesign was motivated by the notions that every story is ongoing, every beat is a site and every author is a brand. Readers are more likely to arrive through search or a shared link, and so they are almost always landing on a story page. For that reason, we emphasized the story page where there’s a lot of related content, features and a carousel. We included a lot of elements to keep you on the site.

We were also looking to simplify our branding. We had a series of local sites and national sites, and we wanted to bring those together into one GlobalNews.ca experience that detects where you are in the country and gives you a blend of national and local news that’s personalized to your region.

How does the site display content specific to a user’s region?

We have 12 stations across Canada, so we divided Canada up into 12 different regions and users get localized to one of them when they arrive on the site. This is based on IP detection, and it’s about 95 percent accurate. For anyone that arrives on the site, it seamlessly checks the region in the background, cookies it and localizes the site to correspond with one of our broadcast centers.

On our site, there are two tabs, local and national. On the local tab, your region will be weighted more with local news, and on the national tab, you will primarily get national news, with your local elements mixed in. On our weather pages, you’ll get weather localized to you, and on our programs page, you’ll get the programs nearest to you.

There are also several places on the site to change your region, so if you don’t want news in Toronto, it takes a couple seconds to change that, and the next time the user returns, the site will have stored their preferences. The stories are localized using a taxonomy, so when a story is filed, the writer checks off a box saying what region it belongs to. It then puts the story into that localized stream on the site.

How do your editors curate content on GlobalNews.ca?

Having a very simple workflow was important to us. When you’re a news organization, minutes and seconds matter. When Margaret Thatcher dies, you want that story up on your homepage as fast as you possibly can because that’s what your audience deserves. So, we tried to keep the content management system of the site as fast, simple and straightforward as possible so that the editorial staff can focus on making great content and getting up quickly.

10up helped us come up with a curation system that powers a lot of the site: the navigation, carousel, featured story, top story. It’s all one system that gives different choices depending on what zone you’re curating, so it’s not like you need to learn one way to manage content in the carousel and another way to manage content in the right rail.

Also, often times, an article headline is written one way, but the featured title needs to be be shorter and punchier, or the featured picture needs to be changed. The curation tool lets us do that.

Can you tell us about how you integrated video into the redesign?

Our heritage is as a broadcast organization, and we have hundreds of videos produced in-house every day. The purpose of the “Watch” tab is that it takes you to the video center and you can sift through by program or topic area. You can also share the content on social media, and it’s essentially as easy as YouTube to embed the video on your site.

The other reality we’ve found is that as much as you have that broadcast console video experience, the most popular way for people to consume video is on the story page. It’s having that in-context video with the story around it. So we’ve focused on working on videos within story pages.

How long did the redesign process take? 

The concept for the redesign came about in September 2011, and the development work started last year. One of the complexities is that we were doing a complete redesign from the ground up — there was not a single comment element to the old site. And, we were going to a new content management system. So with a brand new backend and frontend, with something that impacts hundreds of people in a larger organization across the country, it makes for a fairly complicated project.

The site design was done by Upstatement, and much of the frontend template work was executed by Filament Group. We engaged with 10up in the fall to do the WordPress integration, and then we’ve hired our own development team. We were very fortunate to hire some really top talent to work with us, and we’ve been working with really good partners.

What was it like working with WordPress.com VIP and 10up?

One of the things that makes WordPress powerful is that it is open source and has many plugins, but when you have a project with this much riding on it, and you need a professional product that performs, you want to be cautious. Fairly early on, we knew that we wanted to go with VIP. We wanted that level of support, having people understand how to make WordPress a secure and high performance environment – there was real value there.

The Featured Partner program made selecting a development agency really easy — there was a short list of companies that were already acknowledged as preferred partners, and from there 10up ultimately looked to be the best fit for this project. 10up brought a lot in terms of being able to listen to our needs and turn it into a functional site. They were great for us because we were at a stage where we needed things done very quickly and needed to discuss exactly what we were looking to do and how we were looking to do it – they helped us go from the discovery process to the implementation. Ultimately, getting to that March deadline for us was not easy for any company, but we really benefited from the partnership and they were good to work with.

How has the site redesign changed your newsroom? 

There are some pretty big philosophical and workflow changes. Beforehand, people were spending a lot of time building a page and putting links onto it and massaging it. Now there’s a shift to focus on the creating content as opposed to the administration of the content.

By choosing WordPress as a CMS, and moving to a system that is simpler, we’re hoping to increase the number of people in the organization who are empowered to create and publish content online. We are a large broadcast organization, with newsrooms in 12 locations and journalists in every big market in the country. We have broadcast journalists that are now not only thinking about the evening newscasts, but also publishing news as it is happening. With WordPress, we have something fairly simple for people who it’s not their full time job to publish content, to easily publish online.

Over the weeks and months, we really want to try to create a platform that all of our journalists can use to get the news out quickly and easily when it breaks.

New Editorial Features in WordPress 3.6

We’ve been posting about the development of WordPress 3.6 over the past few months, and while the target launch is coming up later this month, many of these features are already available to WordPress.com users. Here’s a quick overview of the new editorial features.

Post Locking

Working in a multi-author environment? Post Locking lets you see at a glance who’s editing a post, and prevents authors from overwriting each other.

See Who Is Editing What Post
If you navigate to All Posts in your dashboard, you will be able to see who is editing what post.

Prevent Editors from Overwriting Each Other
If you click on a post that another editor is working on, you will have three options to choose from: Go back, Preview, and Take over.

Know If Someone Else Is In Your Post
If you are working on a post and someone takes over, this screen will prevent you from continuing to work on the post.

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Log Out Notification

If for some reason you are logged out of WordPress while still in the dashboard (or editing a post), a pop-up notification will appear and allow you to log in right on the page, so that you won’t lose any work. Once you’ve logged back in, the pop-up will disappear and you will be right back where you left off.

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Better Autosave

The newly revamped Autosave takes advantage of your web browser’s storage to ensure that you never lose your work again, despite a wonky internet connection. If you are editing a post and suddenly get disconnected from the internet, you won’t lose your work. When you get reconnected, you’ll be able to restore the backup and the browser-stored content will simply pop up into your text editor.

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Revised Revisions

WordPress 3.6 gives revisions an update, making it easy to scan through previous revisions and see edits or updates.

Avatars with Revisions
See at a quick glance on your “Edit Post” page who has previously edited a post.

See Changes Easily
The new revisions page includes a slider that lets you move forward or backward through revisions, and colors additions in green and deletions in red.

Compare Revisions
The “Compare Revisions” tool allows you to drag the slider to two different revisions and compare the differences.

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New Look for Post Formats

Note: This feature is still in development. Post Formats got an updated look, which allows you to quickly toggle between different formats (i.e. quote, video, image) using a new bar at the top of “Edit Post.”

To switch to a different post format, simply click the icon at the top.

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Manage Menus with Ease

If your theme supports Custom Menus, the interface to create anad manage these menus has been updated. Now, “Edit Menus” and “Manage Locations” are split into separate tabs. Step-by-step instructions on how to use Custom Menus can be found here.

 

Want more? To see the many updates that went into 3.6, follow the open-source WordPress development here.

Interested in learning more about WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting? Get in touch.

Showcase: Responsive Sites on WordPress.com VIP

Over the last 12 months here at WordPress.com VIP, we’ve seen a lot of innovative, smart redesigns from our clients. The majority of them have chosen to make their sites responsive, meaning that the site and content scales dynamically for desktop, mobile or tablet.

Today we thought we’d showcase some of these examples. Many of these sites are industry-leaders – being either the first responsive news site in their country, or in the case of TIME.com, the first global news site with a fully responsive design. Take a quick browse through this list. We’re very impressed – we hope you are too.

Global News | Built by our Featured Partner 10up

“The new GlobalNews.ca has been completely reinvented to maximize the user experience and make it as easy and intuitive as possible. Central to this philosophy is its use of responsive design technology, which will automatically scale GlobalNews.ca content to fit any screen size or resolution, creating a seamless experience on all browsers and platforms; be it PC, tablet or smartphone.” Read more.

GigaOM

“Our site — and the content on it — now adapts to whatever device you’re reading. The first phase of our site redesign, which went live today, also includes more curation, easier sharing and a crisper display.” Read more.

TIME.com

“On Monday, Oct. 22, TIME.com was the first global news site to roll out a fully responsive redesign optimized for mobile and tablet browsing. … Created by TIME.com design director Davina Anthony with input from the magazine’s design staff, the new look showcases the depth and breadth of their content, with more than 100 new articles, blog posts and photos produced each day.” Read more.

Metro (United Kingdom)

“We’ve unashamedly built this from a mobile-first point of view, sure in the knowledge that mobile users are making up an increasing proportion of our visitors – and will soon be in the majority. … With a flick of your finger you can now swipe or click through the top stories at that time, whether that be stories Metro’s editors think are important or those our users have shown they enjoy by liking, tweeting or reading. And this edition will keep changing throughout the day.” Read more.

Quartz

“Quartz is a website optimized for mobile phones and tablets. And as an HTML5 web app, it works seamlessly across a range of devices, from smartphones to desktop computers. It does not need to be downloaded from an app store and can be accessed simply by going to qz.com. … Quartz is free and built for social distribution: there are no pay walls, registration walls, or app store walls. The site’s radically simple, responsive design helps readers get essential information as quickly as possible.” Read more.

Variety

“The new website addresses years of requests from readers, with a site that’s easy to navigate and automatically configures material to platforms of various sizes and shapes, from large monitors to tablets to mobile devices. … Among the new features: An adaptive design for desktop, tablets and mobile phones; An expandable navigation bar that previews essential content from each site section; A new Video channel featuring news, events, trailers and interviews.” Read more.

The Dish | Built by our Featured Partner 10up

“The Daily Dish was founded in the summer of 2000 by Andrew Sullivan as one of the very first political blogs. … It has a readership of around 1.2 million unique visitors with an average of around 8 million pageviews a month from around the world. The Dish covers anything Andrew, the Dish team or the Dish readership finds interesting – from politics to religion and pop culture and art and film and poetry and philosophy and web humor.” Read more.

Metro (Canada)

“If you’re reading this on a mobile or tablet device, you’ve already noticed that metronews.ca is (we believe) the first national news site in Canada to employ a fully responsive design, meaning that no matter what size screen you view this page on, everything should be formatted nicely and properly.” Read more.

PandoDaily

“We’ve always had two goals we hold above anything else: respecting the readers’ time and respecting the readers’ intelligence. We do the latter with our original, frequently long-form journalism. We do the former with the PandoTicker. … We’ve made the ticker more app-like and dynamic in this version. It constantly updates and “new” flags call out when something is breaking.” Read more.

Black America Web | Built by our Featured Partner Oomph

“BlackAmericaWeb.com, launched in June 2001, is a broad-based effort to become a timely and credible source for news and information covering all aspects of daily life, featuring a wide array of viewpoints and perspectives.” Read more.

The Windsor Star

“The site was designed to make it easy for you to find the content you want. Our search bar scrolls down the page and our menu lets you search for stories based on topics — the courts, TrafficWatch, city hall — or geography. … Above all, the website was designed for our readers, who have told us they value local content above all and who have grown accustomed to reading breaking news on our website and coming back as those stories are updated and enhanced throughout the day. I stone cold love the new look and feel and I hope you will too.” Read more.

Skype Blogs | Built by our Featured Partner HumanMade

The Skype Blogs feature company updates such as new releases, feature updates, product education, and innovative use cases.

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

100,000 Commits on WordPress.com VIP

Last week, a developer at Time Inc. made a milestone commit on WordPress.com VIP: r100000!

Our WordPress.com VIP clients commit and deploy code daily, and often development teams will commit several times a day to keep up with their changing site features and improvements. We do several checks on code optimization and security before approving a commit for deployment, and we’re really proud to get 90% of commits deployed within two hours of submission. We also unveiled automatic deploys for static CSS and images last year, which has made deploying instantaneous for thousands of client code commits.

It took roughly 75,000 deploys to help reach this milestone commit. We began tracking deploys in March 2011, and as you can see in the chart below, we doubled the number of deploys from 2011 to 2012, and are on track to do so again this year.

And, for those who are interested, here’s a peek at commit activity over the course of a week at WordPress.com VIP (times in GMT):

While we’re looking at commit data, here’s a quick nod to the top five committers from the last 365 days: I.N. from Global News (942), C.B. from GigaOM (791), F.I. from Dawn Media (784), V.K. from COED Media Group (652) and E.G. from CBS Local (605).

And finally, here’s a peek at deploys from WordPress.com VIP over the last 3 years.

Interested in learning more about WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting? Get in touch.

Recent Launches on VIP: Global News, TIME 100, Wired TV

We’ve had a lot of fantastic sites debut on WordPress.com VIP lately. Here’s a quick look at some of our latest launches. Welcome to the WordPress family!

Last Monday was a big day, when we launched Global News, a Canadian broadcasting network. The site was developed by our Featured Partner 10up. Stay tuned for an in-depth post on this innovative new site.

This new TIME 100 site is fully responsive and encourages readers to “Cast your vote for the leaders, artists, innovators, icons and heroes that you think are the most influential people in the world.” Their polling system is powered by Polldaddy.

The brand new Wired TV site hosts a large database of videos which can be searched or filtered by channel, popularity or recency.

NI Group Ltd, the home of The Times, The Sunday Times, and The Sun, recently moved their corporate site onto WordPress.com VIP.

Pandora’s blog is a great place to discover new music, and to learn a little bit about their social media community through their embedded Twitter and Instagram feeds.

Ready to become a VIP Services Client? Some of the world’s biggest brands rely on WordPress.com VIP Services.

All About SEO on WordPress.com

On the WordPress.com Blog, we recently published a post on Search Engine Optimization for WordPress.com. It has a ton of great information relevant to authors on WordPress.com VIP, so please check it out and feel free to forward it to your colleagues.

All About SEO on WordPress.com, by Elizabeth Urello

Excerpts:

Common Myths about SEO

Myth: I need a plugin for SEO.

Fact: WordPress.com has great SEO right out of the box — you don’t have to do anything extra. In fact, WordPress takes care of 80-90 percent of the mechanics of SEO for you, according to Matt Cutts, head of Google’s webspam team. All of our themes are optimized for search engines, which means they are designed to make it easy for the Googlebot (and other search engines) to crawl through them and discover all the content.

Smart ways to increase your SERP rank

Make sure to use short, easy-to-read post slugs that accurately describe what your posts are about. On WordPress.com, the post slug is the last part of your post title, which you can edit to be anything you like. For example, the slug “/buying-sailboats” is better than “/how-to-buy-a-beautiful-inexpensive-sailboat-on-Craigslist” or “/354.”

Read the full post here.

Update: What’s Coming Up With WordPress 3.6

The updated target date for WordPress 3.6 Beta 1 is March 27.

By the time Beta 1 rolls around, the core team will have the feature set complete, which means the time for bug testing 3.6 against your themes and plugins will have arrived. According to the 3.6 project schedule, the target date for 3.6 launch is April 29.

Here’s a quick update on where the 3.6 features currently stand. If you aren’t caught up on the features, please take a peek at this introduction post.

Post Formats UI: The UI for post formats is getting a refresh (featuring a drop down selector for formats and better previewing) to make it easier to use and faster to publish. You can take a peek at the wireframes here, and follow along the conversation here.

Autosave and Post Locking: The main goal of this update is so that users never lose a post. This is done by leveraging browser-level storage in modern browsers for situations where users lose their internet connections or their browsers crash. With this enhancement, edits are stored locally and synced back to WordPress at the next possible opportunity. If you are logged out while on an admin page, you will be notified and allowed to log in straight on the page so that you won’t lose your work. As for post locking, if you arrive on a page that is currently being edited, you will be given the option to “take over” or go back.

Revisions: The UI for comparing previous revisions of a post has been significantly updated, including a scrubber bar that allows the user to move forward or back in revisions, and colored text to indicate content that has been added or removed. Take a look at a rough mockup here.

Editorial Flow: This feature has been removed from the 3.6 cycle, but the team is planning to tackle it in future releases.

Menus: The UI for creating custom menus has been significantly cleaned up, with new checkboxes to select where the menu will be displayed in the theme, accordion styling to menu items (being tested), new help text and keyboard accessibility for rearranging menu items.

Twenty Thirteen: As Mark Jaquith writes: “With Twenty Thirteen we’re taking a bold stance: this theme was meant for blogging, and it’s not a blank canvas. It comes pre-marinated with playfulness and warmth and opinions.” Take a peek at a demo of the new Twenty Thirteen theme here.

Where can I find more information?

If you’re not familiar with Make WordPress Core, it’s a good blog to visit. It tracks the open-source development of WordPress, and is the homebase of much of the development discussion.

How do I get involved?

Want to help make WordPress better? Take a peek at the Core Contributor Handbook, or sit in on the weekly developer chat. They will need a lot of help with bug testing and squashing in the coming weeks. Lots of members of the VIP community contribute to core, so you’ll see familiar faces.

When is 3.6 coming to WordPress.com VIP?

Shortly prior to the release of 3.6 on WordPress.org, the 3.6 features will be merged into WordPress.com VIP. This will most likely happen in April, and we will be posting updates here in the weeks before to notify you. If you aren’t already, at that point you’ll need to be testing against trunk, getting the latest nightly build or even better, using an SVN checkout of trunk to test how your sites work on 3.6. You can also use the Beta Tester plugin to easily update beta releases and test.

Q&A: How National Post Liveblogs the News

Since launching our Liveblog add-on here at WordPress.com VIP, we’ve been impressed again and again by how fully the National Post newsroom has embraced the tool as a way to cover live events and breaking news.

They’ve used Liveblog to cover everything, from the Grammy Awards, to Barack Obama’s Inaugural Address, to the Newtown shooting, to Stephen Harper tweeting his entire day. And the results are visually stunning, with a heavy emphasis on story telling through photographs, videos, tweets, commentary, and even gifs.

We chatted with James Martin, Digital Managing Editor, to learn more about how they integrated Liveblog into their newsroom, how they prepare for big live events, and what his favorite Liveblog has been to date.

How does National Post use Liveblog?

I like to use the Liveblog for entertainment and award shows. It’s great for displaying art [videos and tweets] really quickly and efficiently. Rather than us doing picture galleries as we might have done in the past, this gives us the opportunity to do a live picture gallery as things are unfolding. When I talk to my staff about what I want, I tell them to think about including commentary, video, gifs, tweets with the pictures – the Liveblog is an easier way for us to tell a moving story.

How did you train your team on using Liveblog?

To be honest with you, it didn’t take very long to train anybody on it here. It took us about 5 minutes to learn how to use it.

The training process was me getting it implemented on one of our WordPress sites, playing with it for about 5 minutes and testing its functionality. Once I felt like we had a good grasp, I asked one of my staff members to make a 2-3 page guide with screen grabs on how to embed a picture, tweet, YouTube, along with our Liveblog style guide.

National Post’s Liveblogs are rich with pictures, videos, commentary – how does your team plan for Liveblogs?

Too many cooks can spoil a Liveblog unless there is a specific plan. We have very specific roles for people. For example, during the awards shows, one person will be tackling the winners and nominations, making sure the winner graphic goes in. We obviously have those prepared in advance by our graphics editor.

We will also have one or two people (depending on resources) for color. One person will specifically be looking for tweets that value adds on any trends we spot. We’ve also had our style columnist, Nathalie Atkinson, providing fashion commentary at the events.

For the Newtown, CT shootings, there wasn’t any time to prepare. How did your newsroom assemble a Liveblog for that?

For Newtown, we were running stories rapidly throughout the day. Our editors were trying to use their news judgment and a bit of crystal ball gazing – we just didn’t know if this was the type of thing that would work well with a Liveblog. We made the decision to start the Liveblog in probably 15 minutes, after the first reports came through.

At that stage, we were very new to the tool, and there was some learning on the run. But the way it worked best was having one person on the Liveblog, and our other journalists providing news copy to the traditional file. But, there was a lot of overlap. The person on the Liveblog was finding and discovering things, and sharing that information with the news file, and vice versa.

How has your audience responded to the Liveblogs?

The best way of answering that question is to simply look at the type of numbers we get from the Liveblogs. Straight away, the analytics told us that not only are people reading it, but they’re staying on the page a long time and the engagement is high. And, we’re seeing them come back later. That’s the best feedback.

We recently had a big snow event in Toronto. In those situations, people are making split second decisions – can I send my kids to school? Are the busses running? We started that Liveblog at 5 a.m., with quick wraps of what schools are closed, what public services are closed, that’s what people want to read. That information is not always best served in a traditional news file, since shelf life of that information could only be a couple of hours. That weather Liveblog was easily our most read story for the day.

What’s your favorite Liveblog that the National Post has done so far?

In terms of raw news, I was very proud at the way in which we were able to use the Liveblog on the Newtown shooting. In terms of being able to get actual valuable news to the reader, I was not only really amazed at how efficient the tool was at getting information across, but by how our team was able to respond to the event, and funnel what information was needed to be given to the reader quickly.

In terms of showbiz, glitz and gam, any of our showbiz awards blog are great examples of what we do here — we don’t just give people words. The Liveblog really has become an amazing interactive experience with so many dimensions to it. The latest example with The Oscars is probably the best showbiz blog we’ve done.

Not familiar with how the WordPress.com VIP Liveblog Plugin works? Take a look at this video. It’s super easy, featuring content insertion from the front-end of the site, and drag-and-drop image uploads.

The Liveblog Add-On is $500 USD per month, with an annual subscription, for VIP SaaS Hosting clients. This includes unlimited liveblogs, and an unlimited number of users visiting, viewing, and receiving updates — all powered by our massive WordPress.com cloud infrastructure. If you’re interested in using the LiveBlog plugin or learning more, please get in touch.

 

WordPress.com VIP at SXSW

Headed to SXSW? We’d love to see you there.

We’ll be co-hosting a party on Sunday night with Sailthru:

Sailthru and Automattic present
Party for the People
benefiting charity:water
March 10 at 7pm, Stubb’s BBQ
Event Page

Automattic will also be hosting a Happiness Bar at the SXSW Trade Show. Stop by to pick up some swag, chat about WordPress, get technical support, or meet some of our colleagues.

And finally, members from the WordPress.com VIP team will be there! We’d love to catch up with you in person. If you or your colleagues will be at SXSW, be sure to let us know.

See you there!