Senior Executive Media has been working with DevriX on a WordPress development retainer plan since August 2021. In this case study, we will go through our journey working together for the past year or so, during which we’ve covered various initiatives including:
- pulling off an entire publisher platform from the get-go for about 2 months due to tough deadlines
- implementing designs by an awarded internationally recognized designer and a creative industry leader
- building a flexible, modular editorial experience across the board as per editorial requirements without sacrificing performance – web or UX in the dashboard
- extending the WordPress functionality creating a subsystem-like structure for specific category verticals
- satisfying the business requirements of a well-established team with aggregated experience across the largest business communities of Forbes Council and YEC, headed by a Kiplinger veteran spearheading all the efforts
- scaling organically with great CWV results in place
- and many others
About Senior Executive
Senior Executive Media is a publisher media company founded in 2021 and focusing on gathering mission-critical insights and resources for top leaders worldwide. The company aims to serve niche executive audiences across dozens of disciplines and industries. With digital content, full of various case studies, and comprehensive guides, Senior Executive Media successfully reaches public/private companies & nonprofit organizations and provides professionals with the tools to improve their organizations and advance their careers.
Challenges & Solutions
Starting point
We’ve faced different challenges that all started with a bar already set high working with different industry leaders within tight deadlines. Our initial primary goal was to build a scalable platform with no compromises in regard to performance, while also treating each module with SEO best practices in mind.
During the initial phase, we developed a quite flexible setup, allowing fine-tuning of various components across the whole platform such as featuring selected topic hubs, interactive modules boosting lead generation, or custom content recirculation modules.
As part of the MVP and before investing in a more complex solution, we also implemented a flexible ad management system supporting both predefined slots and on-demand ads injection thus providing multiple modules and formats for optimized monetization and promotion opportunities.
Add-ons
Quizzes
One of the next initiatives that we took on, was quizzes integration, which despite looking straightforward, could be a challenge to maintain good page performance while providing an interactive gamified user experience.
Taxonomy verticals
A true publishing platform requires the most optimal way to structure, promote, and index the content published. For this purpose, we had to extend the default WordPress functionality in such a way that we almost created a sub-system in the site.
The requirements were to develop functionality, replacing the default taxonomy archive view with a custom landing page, with unique modules, color scheme, and permalink structure, mimicking the homepage but amalgamating the content around a specific parent topic.
To get this done, the team built an automated mechanism that’s transforming the selected category or tag to its superior version, replacing all internal links and configuring the needed rewrite rules so that there’s no SEO impact from the change, and providing the same flexibility as the rest of the site with the least possible technical debt.
Team, once again, let me tell you how grateful I am for the entire team’s hard, fast, smart work here on the first of many new verticals within seniorexecutive.com.
– Robert Long, Editor in Chief at Senior Executive Media
Creators Section
As an invitation-only program, Senior Executive Creator supports coaches, advisors, and business owners in their efforts to build a recognizable platform, grow their audience, and win new business. However, it is also a major part of the CMS reorganization that we did.
Similarly to the taxonomy verticals, each creator needed to have a dedicated sub-directory of the site, with the respective set of rewrite rules, but a way more dynamic look and feel, as the widgets and modules in use, had to automatically switch depending on how active the creator is, and the amount of content they have published on the platform.
Content distribution & optimisations
As the project was evolving, we explored different ways and channels for content distribution including a multi-newsletter implementation for lead generation, constant SEO improvements, and working on getting the site listed on both Apple News & Google News.
Performance
A crucial part of organic growth is page speed and it’s being recognized as a more and more important metric across all systems and vendors.
At DevriX it’s one of our top priorities to deliver swift and scalable end products and we’re constantly monitoring the performance and working on improvements both on a client request and as part of our maintenance routines.
The results? We’d let them speak for themselves.
Behind the scenes
Due to the variety of tasks we’ve had to tackle, we needed to get a little army involved, and just so we did! During this whole period, we’ve had an internally assigned team of 6 professionals each responsible for different aspects of the project, occasionally involving more manpower when it was needed, but for the most part, we’ve had:
- a project manager taking care of organizing and overseeing the sprints, status, and client communication
- a front-end engineer tackling all the incoming design challenges and new layouts
- a QA specialist making sure everything that’s deployed is top-notch quality and introduces no regressions to the existing functionality and looks
- our SEO analyst to ensure that we’re always following the best practices
- a back-end engineer bringing the new templates and widgets to life, dynamizing the static modules, and developing the logic needed to get it all running
- a technical lead providing the technical expertise needed for a seamless implementation of all architectural tweaks, also covering the R&D part and deployments
Thank you all so much again—I really appreciate all the work you’ve done for us!
– Kelsey Ward, Managing Editor, Creators & Think Tanks