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.

Case Study: BBC America runs on WordPress

BBC America content was previously spread across 3-4 different content management systems. They knew they needed a change and wanted to consolidate their support efforts into a single platform.

We spoke with David Anderson, Senior Product Development Manager at BBC Worldwide, about how WordPress powers BBCAmerica.com, starting with their site redesign a year ago.

How does BBC America use WordPress to power your show network?

The entire BBCAmerica.com site runs on WordPress. It was a gradual change — we first moved our BBC America’s blog, Anglophenia to WordPress, and then the rest of the BBC America site to a WordPress Multisite install after seeing the success of the blog.

Each show has the ability to have its own theme, most of which share a child theme based off the main framework. Each child theme powers its website with a general template which we change to match a show’s content and look & feel. We do this by taking advantage of options in each theme in order to help customize it. Editors can upload their own custom art and customize the site without having to involve a developer.

How long does it take to create a new WordPress site for a BBC America show? 

Since we’re running Multisite, each show gets a new site. We’ve automated the technical creation process to a few form fields and a button. The short answer is that we’ve gotten the process down from 3-5 days to roughly 2 minutes. Keep in mind, this is not including the content that populates the pages, but even that process could take less than a few hours if everything is ready to go. Behind the scenes, there are multiple tasks that run when a site is created. Pages that are needed for each show site such as TV schedule pages are generated, privacy settings are applied so that sites are password protected until they’re ready to be published, menus are created, and connections are made to 3rd party APIs.

How has WordPress streamlined BBC America’s publishing process and editorial workflow?

The ability to create custom content through the WordPress interface (and not have to create custom HTML code) streamlined 80% of the work which in the past had occupied a huge amount of time for a team of four editors. The result is that editors now have more time to focus on content creation instead of figuring out how to edit (or troubleshoot) code. This also helped standardize the user experience because we were able to get the same editing tools and easy-to-use interface into the hands of all of our editors.

Which features of the site are most appreciated by your users?

One important goal for us was to make it as easy as possible to create content quickly and efficiently in a way that “just works.” We were able to streamline the content creation process by customizing the admin interface to allow producers to enter data into fields that make sense for the specific content type they’re creating in each section. We’ve also tried to use drag and drop interfaces when it makes sense. Everyone has gotten used to rearranging apps on their phones by dragging and dropping, and we wanted to carry that experience over into the creation process for the site. Recently, we’ve been hearing from our editors that the updates to the media uploading experience in the 3.5 release have made it much easier and faster to add images and galleries, which is a feature that they really enjoy.

“Our previous platforms locked us into very rigid options. Changes were expensive and took a long time to implement. Now, we have a solid platform that is flexible and constantly being improved.” — David Anderson, Senior Product Development Manager at BBC Worldwide.

How big of a role does social media play in BBC America’s content strategy, and how have you integrated it into the site? 

BBC America is the U.S. home of Doctor Who. That show has a large social media footprint and was probably one of the first shows that made us concentrate on tightly integrating content strategy with social media. We saw great results and now we approach every project with a focus on social. In terms of integrating it into the site, we try to make sure that we’re keeping up with the ever-changing landscape of social networks. We’ve made an effort to implement things like Open Graph and Twitter card tagging on the back-end. On the front-end, we’ve tried to provide ways for visitors to easily share our content. This process is constantly evolving and combines editorial strategy with things like layout tweaks.

How does BBC America like being a part of the open source WordPress community? 

Being a part of the WordPress and open source community in general has allowed us to accomplish things that could have only happened with great difficulty if we had to build another proprietary CMS. Our previous platforms locked us into very rigid options. Changes were expensive and took a long time to implement. Now, we have a solid platform that is flexible and constantly being improved. In most cases, problems can be solved by reading support tickets and blogs. We use several plugins that are available in the WordPress.org plugin repository and it’s amazing how willing plugin developers are to help out when we come across a problem. We try to reciprocate as much as possible and it feels great when we’re able to offer fixes that can help the entire community.

Want more information 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.

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.

 

Case Study: Interactive One Hosts 70 Sites with WordPress.com VIP

Interactive One is the digital link to urban consumers, reaching millions of Black and Latino audiences 24/7.  They are currently #1 in the category with over 60 unique brands on both a national and local level. Their network of 70+ high-traffic websites are all hosted here on WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting.

We spoke with Grant Cerny, Senior Vice President Products, Operations & iOne Studios, about their decision to move from a self-hosted WordPress to WordPress.com VIP Cloud Hosting, and why it was the right choice for their network of sites.

Why did your team choose WordPress as the platform for the Interactive One network?

In 2008, when Interactive One was a brand new digital group of Radio One and trying to bring the organization up to speed with the digital and media advances in the industry, we chose WordPress and WordPress Multiuser as a platform to deliver all the national sites and local sites for the radio sites.

We extended the publishing experience to enable greater scale and efficiency by allowing content to syndicate from site to site.  This was remarkable in that the local sites were able to grab national news and hit publish, making it available on their local sites.  The local sites also started to publish event content back to national sites. This led to an incredible growth, and as a result, we decided to rethink the way we were structuring the sites. Our sites all now share a common WordPress theme which makes it very easy to maintain the codebase and to spin up new ones.

“We needed agility, we needed stability, and we needed security. We’ve got all three of those now with WordPress.com VIP, so now we can focus on the business part of our business instead of the infrastructure.” – Grant Cerny, Senior Vice President Products, Operations & iOne Studios.

Why did you choose WordPress.com VIP to host the network?

Uptime was one of the biggest selling points of WordPress.com VIP. We have huge spikes of traffic (for example, when Whitney Houston passed) as a lot of our content goes viral with our users on social networks, and VIP’s infrastructure is able to sustain those with no changes on our end; it just works!

Hosting with the WordPress.com VIP Cloud and working with the VIP developer team ensures that our code is not only up to WordPress coding standards, but that internally we have some guidelines and resources to use as best practices to make our development more secure and faster.

We needed agility, we needed stability, and we needed security. We’ve got all three of those now with WordPress.com VIP, so now we can focus on the business part of our business instead of the infrastructure.

Tell us more how syndication works across your national and local sites.

We have syndication services which are running on each of our sites, so we can easily turn one into a cross-post hub or syndication hub. In each of these hubs, we can subscribe to particular sites/markets, and then hand-pick which content get published on a national level, with just a click. We can also automate publishing certain content which is relevant, and cross-post across our national markets like Hello Beautiful down to specific local markets.

We use canonical tags to tell Google and other search engines which is the ‘master’ post, and therefore not duplicate content, and it links back to the original content.

How long did it take you to launch the Interactive One network with WordPress.com VIP?

After we stabilized the code we wanted for the common theme (about a month of work), we were able to roll out 60 live sites with WordPress.com VIP in 3 weeks. When we want to automate a new change across all the sites, we write a Selenium script and it enables the changes for all the sites at once.

How long does it take to launch a new site now on WordPress.com VIP?

It could be incredibly quick. Once we get a design approved internally with our theme layout options, which we designed to be as flexible and to meet as many needs as possible, all they need to do is give our team a vector logo and a basic design scheme and we can often stand up a site in a day!

How does mobile rank in terms of importance for consuming your content?

Our audience traditionally skews towards mobile – 40% of traffic on our national brands is mobile. In designing the site, we’ve managed to get 100% of our WordPress.com site features into a responsive mobile experience, so our users get just as good of an experience from their mobile or tablet device as their desktop. We’ve seen engagement go up 2x since we launched this responsive design, and we’ve received a lot of feedback from users and partners on how well the sites appear on tablets, too.

Why does Interactive One believe WordPress’s status as an open source project has contributed to the success of the project?

It’s the power of the open source community which makes WordPress as good as it is. With more than 23,000 plugins in the WordPress.org Plugin Repository, you’re looking at saving a lot of money by having a starting point for a lot of your development. You’re a part of a community where all boats are intended to rise.

Want more information about WordPress for large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

Recent Mobile Launches on WordPress.com VIP

We’ve been really impressed with the mobile sites that have launched on VIP recently, many of which are responsive websites. Here’s a quick roundup of recent mobile launches on WordPress.com VIP.

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Quartz

Quartz’s fully responsive theme is blindingly fast, and scales whether you’re looking at it on a phone, tablet or laptop. The site looks and feels like an application. You can read more about Quartz’s innovative design here and here.

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LocalTV

LocalTV’s mobile app (available in both the iTunes and Android stores), is powered by a custom mobile theme that is wrapped into an app. It also receives “rich” push notifications, meaning they can push HTML updates.

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Time.com’s Person of the Year

TIME.com’s Person of the Year site was launched in just two weeks using a responsive theme.

Our Q&A with TIME.com Managing Editor Cathy Sharick

Time.com’s responsive redesign announcement

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GigaOM

GigaOM’s clean site is also responsive, and is easy to navigate on a mobile phone with a slide out menu on the left for sections and on the right for search and social tools.

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Metro

Metro’s site is fully responsive, with the added functionality of being able to swipe from one article to the next when on a touchscreen device.

Read more about Metro’s mobile-first redesign

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The Vivant

TheVivant.com’s mobile site takes advantage of beautiful slideshows that pop up inside of your mobile browser and allow you to swipe through pages that have both large photographs and in-depth captions. It is a child theme of WPtouch.

Read more about the new StyleCaster.com

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NeilLeifer.com

The translating the beautiful photography site of Neil Leifer onto a mobile device can be tricky. On this beautiful site, each gallery is represented by a thumbnail: tap once to see the name of the gallery, tap twice to load the gallery.

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Williams

Williams recently updated their site with a responsive design, which re-orients their homepage carousel from horizontal in the desktop version to vertical in a mobile version, and adds mobile-friendly navigation.

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Radar Online

The mobile version of Radar Online provides the full Radar experience, complete with slideshows, videos, commenting and social media tools.

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Naked Security

Using a child theme of WPtouch, Sophos’ Naked Security blog loads lighting fast, and offers mobile-friendly drop down menus.

Time.com Chooses WordPress.com VIP for Person of the Year Website

When TIME.com started planning their Person of the Year coverage in 2012, they knew the whole world would be watching the announcement. They chose to publish the site on WordPress.com VIP, and in the first few hours of the site going live, traffic instantly skyrocketed – 3,000 retweets, 7,000 Facebook shares and links from every major media outlet around the world.

TIME.com’s managing editor Cathy Sharick took the time to answer a few questions for us about why they chose WordPress, how they approached creating the website, and how they assembled the site in just two weeks.

How did your team approach creating the Person of the Year website? 
Last October, we rolled out a fully responsive redesign of TIME.com, which offered both a cleaner, fresh aesthetic and a uniform browsing experience across all platforms – desktop, mobile, tablet. We wanted to make sure that the 2012 Person of the Year franchise gave readers that same rich, satisfying experience.

Related: TIME.com Running Verticals on WordPress.com VIP

Why did your team choose WordPress.com VIP to create the Person of the Year website? 
Almost all of our new Web content is now created on WordPress. We have developed a responsive theme that we can use to easily launch a new section of our website and quickly start creating content.

Because we already had this template in place from our redesign, it just made the most sense for us to give users the same experience for our Person of the Year content. There are challenges with any new project, but for the most part creating this new section on WordPress was fairly simple.

How long did it take to put the project together, from start to finish?
It took us about two weeks from when we made the decision to publish Person of the Year on WordPress to launching the new section of our website.

How is this year’s Person of the Year website different from previous years?
In previous years, the way our Person of the Year special was built, users had to click through a single slideshow that reloaded each page to navigate through the content. This time around we created an entirely freestanding Person of the Year section on our site where all of our content could live underneath, whether it was an article, photo gallery, video etc. By clearly labeling our content as “Person of the Year” in this section of the site we made it easier for users to navigate from one piece of content to the next, and from the new Person of the Year issue to previous years.

How did your team use social media to complement the Person of the Year website, and to drive traffic to the site?
Social media has become a part of everything we do on TIME.com and last year’s announcement was no different. The second we published the announcement on our site we sent out a Tweet and Facebook post from our brand pages and spent the day updating our Tumblr and Pinterest accounts with rich multimedia content so that our readers had a wealth of content to choose from on their social media accounts.

Barack Obama is TIME's 2012 Person of the Year | ti.me/VQVajw #POY2012

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TIME.com (@TIME) December 19, 2012

This year we also partnered with a new startup called RebelMouse because we wanted a place on our site where we could easily display all of the social reactions we were getting to Barack Obama being selected as the 2012 Person of the Year. We published this page where we could feature the responses from readers, and we plan to do similar projects in the future with them.

Want more information about WordPress for large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

NASA’s Open Government Initiative Websites powered by WordPress

“We use WordPress as a flexible platform – it’s a CMS that we adapt to a whole bunch of needs,” – Sean Herron, Technology Strategist, NASA.

The NASA Open Government Initiative team is responsible for fulfilling the Open Government directive, which challenges federal agencies to become transparent, participatory, and collaborative.

“We’re dedicated to making it easier for citizens to interact with NASA and engage in what NASA is doing; to understand our mission and all the programs we have, and to leverage government data and technology in novel ways,” said Nicholas Skytland, Program Manager for NASA’s Open Government Initiative.

To accomplish this mission, NASA’s Open Government Initiative team hosts a series of related websites, many of which are powered by the Open Source WordPress Content Management System.

“Open Source is a core part of the agency’s Open Government Plan and we knew we wanted to base our site off of open source technology.” – Sean Herron, a NASA contractor and Technology Strategist on the NASA Open Government team. “We use WordPress as a flexible platform – it’s a CMS that we adapt to a whole bunch of needs.”

open.NASA.gov: Sharing and transparency

To increase transparency, NASA’s Open Government team launched their first WordPress site, open.NASA.gov in July 2011, as a collaborative platform to share success stories and projects they are working on.  The content on the site is written by NASA employees and contractors across the agency.

NASA integrated WordPress with their Active Directory so that any of the 18,000 people working for NASA are now automatically enabled as potential authors for the site.

“A large portion of the people who go to our site to write a blog post have already used WordPress in some way,” said Ali Llewellyn, a NASA contractor and community manager on the Open Government team.

“WordPress allows me to invite users from across the agency to submit their content in a fairly easy interface. I am constantly trying to enable non-technical personnel to contribute to our team’s blog, and they can actually figure it out in WordPress,” said Ali Llewellyn.

On the administration side, the small team at NASA in charge of managing the WordPress sites utilizes WordPress Multisite so they can easily administer their sites in a central location and with standardized monitoring and analytics tools.

“[WordPress Multisite] allows us to work easily within our various websites and keep them consistent and connected. We frequently use the site stats features, tracking the links clicked, referrals, and other metrics to keep updated on what people looking for when they visit NASA,” added Llewellyn.

data.NASA.gov: Empowering the public through indexable datasets

data.NASA.gov, another site NASA launched using WordPress, is a searchable index of the data sets NASA has released to the public. There are more than 1200 individual datasets via 45 posts in the index, which have added metadata through WordPress custom fields, and these datasets are also accessible via the JSON API so that the public can access the data in a machine-readable format.

“Having all this code available and shared by the rest of the WordPress community makes it easier for us to work on the site…it would have taken a lot longer, and cost much more, if we had had to code it all ourselves.” – Sean Herron, Technology Strategist, NASA.

Submissions of data come from inside NASA, as well as from the general public, which are published after being moderated. “Our policy is to open our platforms as much as we can – on open.NASA.gov it means any NASA employee can be a contributor, on data.NASA.gov it means anyone in the world can submit a dataset,” said Skytland.

NASA’s data is spread over thousands of servers and FTP sites all over the Internet, making it very difficult for the public to access and reuse the data as a resource. There was not a comprehensive list available to the public. Data.nasa.gov was designed to bring together a listing of these datasets to help the public better understand and use NASA’s data.

“Since launching the site NASA has seen a huge increase in people searching for the data, and it’s an important resource for developers, scientists, and students,” said Herron. “NASA’s data search isn’t just helping the scientists and students of the world, it’s helping entrepreneurs and application developers, too. Many developers of mobile applications are gathering their data directly from NASA,” Herron added.

code.NASA.gov: Sharing code with the public and other agencies

Launched in January 2012, code.NASA.gov is a WordPress-powered hub for all the open source code and processes NASA will release to the public.

“The site will serve to surface existing projects, provide a forum for discussing projects and processes, and guide internal and external groups in open development, release, and contribution,” said William Eshagh, a NASA contractor and member of NASA’s Open Government team, in a blog post about the launch.

In addition to the code released, perhaps even more useful will be the information NASA releases about the licensing and processes they use for releasing code so it will have value both internally and to the public.

“We’ve made some progress in championing the use of open source software and we really want to make it easier for people in NASA to release open source applications. One of the biggest challenges with the government releasing open source code or plugins is making sure the code released isn’t proprietary or insecure in some way. We’re working on creating a process of all the steps and checks involved in releasing code for open source purposes so this can be done faster and more securely, and we hope that other agencies will build upon these processes just like they can with our code,” said Skytland.

NASA is hoping to encourage other federal agencies to embrace open source technologies and is working with several agencies on understanding how APIs can be utilized to enable the public to interact with their data in a more useful way. NASA also wants to become more active in developer communities, and they are already making some code available on Github, the Social Coding site, as well as aiming to release code back to the WordPress community.

“Our goal is to release the work we’ve done with WordPress to the open source community as well, including themes, plugins, our metadata collector and scripter, and customizations to the API, and in the future this code will live at code.NASA.gov. We’re really interested in fostering a two-way communication where members of the public and developers can contribute to the work that we’re doing in a bi-directional manner,” said Herron.

Multisite and Theme Development

Though all of their sites have different scopes and content, NASA’s Open Government Team uses a single WordPress backend to power them. “We use WordPress as a flexible platform – it’s a CMS that we adapt to a whole bunch of needs. We have the same platform and interface for all of our sites and we drive the backend through WordPress Mulitsite so it has a single administration panel,” said Herron.

99% of the code used in the NASA WordPress sites was already available via the WordPress Codex or via plugins on the WordPress.org plugin repository. This allowed a small development team to save the Agency thousands of dollars on development costs while still supporting several sites. “Having all this code available and shared by the rest of the WordPress community makes it easier for us to work on the site as only 20% of our jobs – it would have taken a lot longer, and cost much more, if we had had to code it all ourselves,” said Herron.

Want more information about WordPress for government or large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.

WordPress Powers Politics

WordPress is the most powerful content management system in the world – today it powers just under 17% of the top one million websites in the world. Millions of people from across the globe turn to WordPress to build websites of all shapes and sizes and across all different categories.

Now that the political conventions are over and we have officially turned the corner towards the November election, WordPress.com VIP is proud to release this infographic which clearly shows that WordPress is now the backbone that powers websites from across the political spectrum.

Check it out!

This research project started when we began to notice that more and more political websites were being built on WordPress. We focused on a couple of key categories: state parties, U.S. House races, U.S. Senate races, and Gubernatorial races. We looked at all of the major-party candidates across these categories and manually checked to see what content management system was being used. We were excited by the results and thus, they became the impetus for this lovely infographic.

If you want to learn more about WordPress for your political website, or any other purpose, get in touch with the WordPress.com VIP team here.

Spread the Word

Copy the embed code below to share the infographic on your own site:

<a href="http://vip.wordpress.com/2012/09/13/wordpress-powers-politics/"><img title="WordPress Powers Politics -- compiled by WordPress.com VIP: Enterprise Hosting and Services for WordPress" src="http://vip.files.wordpress.com/2012/09/wordpress-com-vip-politics-infographic-final-1.png" alt="WordPress Powers Politics - Infographic" width="759" height="1896" /></a>

The Wall Street Journal: Real-time news with WordPress

Summary: The Wall Street Journal uses WordPress in several different ways to power their content, as the engine of their popular blogs, and as a curation and organizational tool for their real-time news streams.

The Wall Street Journal Blogs

The biggest benefit of using WordPress in their site workflow is the time-to-market. They use standard templates which can be customized, and usually it only takes a few hours from the request being submitted to launching the site.When the WSJ started using WordPress with their editorial blogs several years ago, they launched with an initial four blogs. Today, they have 30+ active blogs, and 70-80 total blogs. Sites remain online in the WSJ Blog Archive after special events have concluded, such as Obama’s First 100 Days, the Olympics, and the G-20.

In particular their “Real Time” blogs, like India or China Real Time, are a tool for them to venture quickly into a new news market and to create ad hoc topic-focused news portals. They create localized, mini versions of WSJ.com in different languages using WordPress and can be up and publishing to that readership in a few hours.

In addition to the speed-to-market reasons for using WordPress, the ease-of-use of the interface is also critical for their publication. The WSJ uses WordPress’ flexibility and user roles to set up a streamlined editorial review workflow which means content can be published faster and editorial workflows are optimized instead of forced by the software. As they expand their newsroom and sites, they are working with a greater number of collaborators to cover all the local markets, subjects, and real-time news. Using WordPress means they can work with collaborators without time-consuming and expensive CMS training to get them up to speed.

Beyond the WSJ.com domain, several other sites in the WSJ Digital Network use WordPress as well – most notably MarketWatch, SmartMoney, AllThingsD, and Barron’s.

WSJ Streaming Stories

WSJ Streams are a new interface from The Wall Street Journal for reading about large events, breaking news stories, markets coverage, and other areas at the core of the Journal’s reporting. A stream is a single page that a reader can leave open and, without reloading, watch the news develop in real-time including headlines, articles, breaking news alerts, markets data, documents, photos, Twitter tweets, and generally any new information about the subject or event.

The WSJ uses WordPress as the tool to integrate and curate content from multiple CMS, APIs, and services to provide a centralized stream of activity. Journalists select custom post types in WordPress which then create a query which pulls in all the relevant articles, images, and other media from their internal Newscloud through internal APIs into WordPress, to create the WSJ Stream. The stream provides a real-time feed which users can follow and get updates about a particular topic.

WSJ plans to rely more and more on WSJ Streams to tie all the content they are already producing in one centralized location, especially in the case of breaking news. They use WordPress so the editors can leverage the administration panel and dashboard instead of creating yet another web tool that they have to log into and manage. For more information on the WSJ streams, read more about on the WSJ Streams here on VIP News.

Want more information about WordPress for large-scale / enterprise installs? Contact WordPress.com VIP Services.