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How We Rebuilt a Website From Scratch for a 100-year-old Magazine in the US?

About the Client: 

  • The client is an online magazine that publishes think pieces, opinion essays, and research articles focusing on K-12 education. 
  • With a solid reputation of more than 100 years, they empower their readers with top-notch articles on education policy, research, practice, innovations, and more. 
  • With a vision to create a positive impact on the education system, they also stepped into the digital space recently. 
  • They are based out of the U.S. with a massive readership-base consisting of K-12 teachers and school leaders, researchers, university faculty, and government policymakers of local and state school boards.

Need Mapping: 

Despite having created a distinct identity among educational publications in the country, their enormous print-readership did not convert to digital followers when they shifted their archive online due to the rising digital trend. The existing website look-and-feel was outdated and thus, demanded a revamp with customization of layout, widgets, images, and content.  Further, to capitalize on the digital readership-base, they wanted to create a paywall on their web portal with a completely new look. 

Problem Statement:

  • The current website was outdated and unappealing design that required complete revamping.
  • SEO techniques were not very effective due to ineffective design and poor content. 
  • The website had a high load-time leading to unfavourable SEO score.
  • Even with all the necessary improvements and corrections, it was an uphill task to get the website ranked on the first page of Google SERP in India, the U.S. and the U.K. within merely 3 months.

Key Challenges Faced by the Client That Were Successfully Mitigated by Agency Couch:

  • Redesigned UI using WordPress that enabled the client to easily customize all content and images as per their needs. 
  • Appropriate need-mapping of the portal’s users and identifying the right interface matching the client’s preferences. 
  • Enabled the client to self-customize widgets with an ‘add button’ and ‘color picker’ option.
  • Built a mechanism that successfully identifies subscribers from the user-database and grants access for all the educational resources after identity validation. 
  • Optimized the portal with a search feature for easy accessibility of information by the users. 
  • Built an easy-to-use admin interface that does not require any technological background for future updates by the clients.

The Agency Couch Approach – Collaboration, Innovation, and 100% Client-satisfaction:

  • Goal: Developing and designing a stunning, user-friendly, and easily customizable online interface for an educational magazine. 
  • Strategy and Research: Understanding the client’s problem and needs in detail to customize a solution that successfully plugs in all the loopholes. After several discussions at various touchpoints, a solid wireframe was created catering to all the requirements of the client. 
  • Development and Designing: Once the wireframes were created, our design team created the UI from scratch to enhance the visual display of the website. The back-end team integrated the components on WordPress and a flawless website was built in just 4 months. 

Technology Used:

Wireframing and Design tool: Figma

Content Management System: WordPress

USP: Adoption of the WordPress platform that enables easy content updates and introduction of the colour-picker tool that allows the client to do several front end customizations in a hassle-free manner. 

Key Results & Impact:

How Agency Couch Built an Effective Online Version of a Leading Education Publication.

  • Enhanced user-experience with improved designs and updated technology.
  • Online paywall mechanism that easily identifies subscribers and non-subscribers to allow filtered access as per their subscription validation.
  • Introduction of a search feature that navigates users to the desired article with the help of specific keywords.
  • Easy-to-use, customized back-end panel that does not require any technical knowledge for future content updates. 

Closing Thoughts:

This project was a great learning experience for our team and the challenges that propelled came our way led us to customize and innovate new and better solutions. Effective communication with clients has always played a key role in the success of our deliverables. Apart from that, a key takeaway from this project was that UI is the primary component in website designing to woo clients and their users.

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