In a never-ending campaign to improve online readership, lobbying eyes in a heavily saturated 24-hour news cycle, broadcast stations across the country are reevaluating site design and functionality. And in the new web-centric world, no publication can afford not to.
Local TV LLC, which operates 21 broadcast stations from various networks in 16 U.S. cities, needed to update its legacy content management system. The broadcast management company’s team knew they wanted an easy-to-integrate and customizable WordPress.com VIP platform for its network of sites and a web design team that understood the modern web from a designability and user functionality perspective.
The company was also looking to study how users consumed the news and navigate through its news sites, honing in on page views, site traffic and popular content worth giving hierarchy to. Local TV LLC came to Doejo in the spring of 2011 to help them expand on what its stations were good at: a dedication to hyper-local news and weather coverage.
Doejo’s development and discovery team did a comprehensive job helping Local TV LLC define its audience, parsing through billions of page views from websites that reach more than 15 million people each month.
In what has been one of our most extensive projects to date, we applied the user discovery information we learned and produced a custom WordPress.com VIP design flexible enough to be used by all Local TV LLC stations. The new platform is much easier for editors, reporters and producers to upload content cleanly, efficiently and consistently. And after viewing the heat maps of where users were viewing the page and how far they would scroll, our designers made the pages more condensed with easily navigational tabs and more logical locations for content.
While reducing clutter and giving breaking news prominence at the top of the page, the page design allows for Twitter-style status updates on ongoing news items without compromising valuable ad space.
Developers also integrated social media platforms so readers can recommend stories and comment using Facebook, Twitter and other networks. Other third party integration natively ties in an online video platform, a social login and authentication provider, a hyper-local news platform and numerous advertising partners. To better manage ads, our developers also wrote a custom open-source plug-in called Ad Code Manager.
Read more about Local TV LLC in our case study here. And visit some of our newly desgined sites: KSTU Fox Salt Lake City, WNEP ABC Scranton, WITI Fox Milwaukee, or view the full list with links here.