Lesvosnews.net

Drupal 9, NEWS PORTAL

Project description

Lesvosnews.net is the No. 1 informative news portal of Lesvos. It officially started operating in September 2010 providing a daily flow of news on issues of Lesvos and the wider North Aegean. With the percentage of users visiting the page from mobile phones increasing more and more, it was now imperative to create a new website with modern design and functionality. A big challenge for us to undertake such a big project in Drupal 9!

Our approach

Creating a successful website starts with an effective process of designing and understanding needs.

Structure definition

We recorded the old thematic categories of the articles and defined the new structure of the site so that it is more understandable to the user and the content editors.

Functional Design

Our visual approach aimed at the most functional use and enjoyable reading of the articles on the page from desktop, smartphone and tablet.

Content Transfer

Transferring content from the previous page was one of the most important but also the most difficult issues we had to deal with. The content had to be transferred correctly without losing anything or becoming corrupt eg due to incompatibilities, to match the old fields with the new ones and to maintain at the same time the urls of the articles and categories. The photos, galleries and attachments in many articles also had to be transferred correctly, with our ultimate goal being that the transferred articles should be the same with the ones created after the transfer.

The bugs that drupal 9 had in the migration part were also a significant obstacle which in fact were differentiated several times during the implementation time of the page due to the evolution of drupal itself. To facilitate the development, the whole migration process had to be able to be fully imprinted in code and be repeatable.

Ad placement Strategy

We made sure to make a different distribution of ads on each type of screen so as not to tire readers and at the same time to have increased revenue and better functionality of the ad management system.

Hosting

Drupal 9 has more complex and heavy code than 7, but also offers more advanced caching techniques to make it look faster to the visitor. These had to be configured correctly for the needs of the page and we also had to make configuration changes on our dedicated servers. The high speed we achieved resulted in the best navigation experience for the user but also the improvement of the SEO of the page since the page load time as well as the use of https are taken into account in the ranking of Google.

GOOGLE ANALYTICS RESULTS

  • doubled the amount of visitors
  • increase in the average time spend in the website by 20%
  • reduction of website abadonment by 20%