Website redesign and migration for the popular American fashion magazine, W Magazine
- Web Engineering
- Data Migration
- User Experience Design
- User Interface Design
- LiveOps
THE BACKGROUND
After acquiring W Magazine from Conde Nast, Future Media Group had an ambitious plan for the magazine’s digital presence. To meet their goal of building a long-term foundation for their digital efforts, they first needed to revamp the UI, optimize the advertising streams and migrate to a stable and flexible host capable of handling the site’s high traffic.
THE BACKGROUND
CHALLENGES
CHALLENGES
- Inflexible, unscalable and insecure hosting environment
- Tens of thousands of pages and media to migrate with no downtown or damage to the site’s SEO
- Outdated UI/UX throughout the site
- Sometimes, advertisements – an important source of revenue – would display erroneously or broken
THE SOLUTION
CXR Agency helped the W Mag team with their migration strategy – leveraging WordPress VIP to ensure a secure, stable and scalable hosting solution – and revamped core UI elements while maintaining the brand’s core aesthetics.
THE SOLUTION
SOLUTIONS / PROCESS
W Magazine had plenty of hosts to choose from but needed some help deciding which one was best for them. Tapping into our knowledge of these hosts from past experiences, we were able to find the perfect fit for the W Mag team in WordPress VIP due to its security, flexibility, and ability to remain stable regardless of high traffic spikes.
We recommended WordPress VIP because its Infrastructure is built specifically for WordPress CMS and optimized for high traffic websites like W Magazine. It’s also one of the fastest, most secure platforms on the market, with unlimited storage, bandwidth, CDN, and dedicated support. And since W Mag regularly sees several large spikes in traffic, they needed a host that can efficiently manage sudden and intense fluctuations in site traffic so the W Mag team never needs to worry about their site crashing on them.
WordPress VIP also offers a multi-website structure. This allows for the creation of multiple websites mapped to their respective domains, with their UI design, while also using the same code base. Multi-website structures are incredibly cost-efficient for this reason.With WordPress VIP, we were able to embed custom-built content from the magazine’s video site, and filter particular regions – for example, the UK – to have a dedicated site URL like uk.wmgazine.com in order to cater to that region’s particular demographic.
W Magazine already had an established branding guide but wanted to give the site a slight facelift to keep it fresh. We worked together to update fonts, hover states, menus and more to fit the brand better.We also made sure to unify their ad technology across all three of their websites to ensure strong revenue streams.
WordPress VIP also offers a multi-website structure. This allows for the creation of multiple websites mapped to their respective domains, with their UI design, while also using the same code base. Multi-website structures are incredibly cost-efficient for this reason.With WordPress VIP, we were able to embed custom-built content from the magazine’s video site, and filter particular regions – for example, the UK – to have a dedicated site URL like uk.wmgazine.com in order to cater to that region’s particular demographic.
RESULTS
The migration went off without a hitch: no lost data, no broken links and no downtime. Since the update, their advertising has grown more consistent and stable, ensuring a more reliable revenue stream. Future Media Group was so impressed with our expertise, rapid turnaround and results of the partnership that they’re planning several other projects with CXR Agency to improve their digital assets throughout the next 12 months.