And, proudly, we’d like to say we had a little bit to do with the project.  Not a lot, mind - we provided some consultancy, some code snippets, advice and developer support now and then.  It’s the kind of project we’d have loved to have taken on in full, but the in-house team at the Telegraph were perfectly capable of doing the work and we always say that if you have the in-house skills then you shouldn’t spend a small fortune on external consultants and developers.

The Telegraph's blogs, running on WordPress MU

The site is a fairly typical MU implementation, but with a few interesting tweaks in the way they’ve configured.  Instead of giving each journalist their own blog, they’ve understood that some simply won’t be that active.  Instead, authors tend towards having a category of their own to work with.  So if you go to Shane Richmond’s blog, for instance, you’re actually seeing the Author Archive view that WordPress provides, within the general Technology Blog.

In fact, the flexibility of WordPress, the way you can output content differently according to category or author, all helped to contribute towards creating a platform that Telegraph Media feel they can grow with.

Challenges

One of the key things to think about with media blogs like this is that traffic can be astonishing.  A lot of questions were asked early on about scalability and performance in WordPress.  Because it’s a purely dynamic system, running more like an application than a group of static files, different approaches have to be taken with caching and performance.  The database server is one key area that always needs consideration - especially when you have to consider 200 concurrent users.

One interesting lesson learned is that with WordPress you have to be exceptionally careful about go-live processes.  Our standard process is to run two installs - one for pre-production and one for live.  There is never a beta running that suddenly finds itself running on a different domain name.

At the Telegraph we know that the way they did it was to run a beta on a subdomain prior to running a search and replace script (not sure if it was one of our own developer’s PHP database search and replace scripts that we use for migrations) and then point the domains right over to it.  That resulted in poor performance initially, even though load testing had confirmed everything to be OK.  Consequently the go-live was held back for a few days, but once WordPress had settled down performance picked up markedly.  The issue appears to be to do with cached variables not resetting on the move.  We’ll document our low-hassle approach to migrating WordPress installs shortly on this site.

The Future

Well, we can’t talk for what will happen at Telegraph Media in the future, but what we do see is increased interest in WordPress as a blogging tool for newspapers.  But beyond that it’s even more interesting - some groups like Informa Telecoms & Media are starting to use WordPress as complete news platforms.  For Informa we built the Telecoms.com site almost entirely from WordPress - this not only led to increased journalistic productivity, but increased traffic and reader engagement.  Seeing the comments section slowly spring to life as readers started to understand its potential has been a real joy to see.

We imagine that it will be magazines and local newspapers that make the first moves to WordPress as a news platform, but when will the first national do it?  We’d like to be there for them if they make the leap!  WordPress is fully capable thanks, in no part, to some of the excellent work in turning WP into what is essentially framework by Donncha O’Caoimh, a WordPress core developer, and others on the WordPress.org team.

If the interest in The Telegraph’s move by such important figures as Kevin Anderson at the Guardian, Simon Dickson (a WordPress friendly rival who specialises in e-Government sites), and others is anything to go by then WordPress is booming in the news sector.  Good!

So, what does this actually mean?  A new site usually comes with something different, and in this case we didn’t want to disappoint.

WordPress Focus

New site, new features, new challenges

One of the biggest changes you’ll see now is that we’re focussing more strongly on our WordPress practice.  We’ve always believed in WordPress as a CMS, and have used it as such for both our own and our client sites since 2006, but it’s only recently that the market has caught up with us.  We were the first UK practice to be approved for listing on Automattic’s WordPress Consultants List, and we believe that we’re either the country’s leading WordPress developers or very close to it.

More Products

We’ve also added some new products to our site:

1. A wider range of WordPress related training courses
2. Google Adwords Packages
3. Web Development services

There is, of course, more to come online in the coming year.  If you’re wondering what, just watch the news section of this site…

More Information

There’ll also be more information on this site.  We’ve created sections for a Portfolio and for Case Studies - the Portfolio part giving a light view of our work, while the Case Studies section gives in depth coverage of our selected items of work, showing how we did the work and the advantages that we’ve brought to our clients.

Client Section

Clients, and those on support contracts, will have access to our new Client Section which uses the excellent Mantis Bug Tracker.

Whizzy Bits

We wanted to get a lot of information onto our home page without overwhelming visitors with a large amount of text.  This is beneficial from the point of view of search engines, but also gives visitors quick access to a lot of information.  So we’ve used lots of lovely jQuery to make this an interactive space that gives prominence to the latest content whilst making other content still easy to find.

Telecoms.com uses WordPress Interconnect IT's extensions and theme technology as a flexible news platform

Overview

When we were approached by Informa Telecoms & Media Ltd (part of Informa plc) about whether WordPress could be used as a fully fledged news platform suitable for replacing their Telecoms.com site, we hesitated, but not for very long.  Following a full analysis of their requirements we were able to confirm that in combination with some of our own technology, plus some new development, we could create a very flexible WordPress based news platform that allowed for excellent productivity for the Telecoms.com team.

Analysis

One of the biggest problems that Telecoms.com had experienced with their previous Java based system was that there was relatively little flexibility built into the system.  Most changes meant going back to the developers with a formal request.  This was both expensive (developers usually are), time consuming and, worst of all, meant that the site could not respond quickly to events in the market place.

What was needed was an ability to create new sections on the site, quickly, without use of expensive development staff.  We had already proven this technology with our Caribou News Theme that we offer freely as a GPL project through our Spectacu.la site, and this helped us to assure the Informa TM team that we were able to match their requirements.

Planning & Design

We worked with the Telecoms.com team initially to supply a range of mock-ups.  However, although they were effective, they weren’t exactly what was wanted by the team.  In order to expedite matters we agreed to work with a third party design agency, Coast Digital, who supplied excellent designs in Fireworks format.  These took some of our ideas and built upon them to create the sophisticated and attractive site that is now visible.

At the same time, we planned the structure of the site and how its framework would allow the client to manage content.  We decided that although the Caribou sections system is useful the full requirements as planned meant that we decided to use a page based widget driven system for the site.  This would allow the client to create pages using the section page template that is part of the theme and this would initiate a series of widget spaces which would become available in the WordPress back-end.  Once available, various standard and custom widgets, appropriately styled, could be dropped in place.

The Sections System

The Interconnect IT category listing plugin in action.

The ability to create sections full of widget spaces is only useful if you have suitable widgets to place there.  One of the biggest parts of the project was creating and styling a wide range of widgets that allowed the site adminstrators to quickly create a new section and populate it with content.  The primary key to this is Interconnect IT’s Category Lister Widget which allows a client to select content according to logical category criteria.  You could have a set of regional categories and a set of format categories and choose items that are in both.

In this case, there are a range of format categories such as News, Opinion and so on, and a continental based region categorisation.  If the client wishes to select content that is news based from America, they simply choose those two categories and any content that matches the criteria will be displayed.

The key advantage to this is that a new section can be created within minutes.  For example, should there be a business need to create a Nokia section, the client could create a category for Nokia, and then select content that is News and Nokia for one widget, Opinion and Nokia for another, and so on.  They then add the navigation to the section using the menu builder plugin we modified for the purpose, and the section becomes ‘live’.  The whole job of creating a Nokia news and information section could be carried it in less than quarter of a section.  For a responsive news site this facility is extremely important.

Getting a new section built would take weeks and was a complicated task. Now we can do it on the fly. It allows us so much more freedom and opportunity to do innovative things, and neatly get rid of stuff that doesn’t work out.

James Middleton, Managing Editor of Telecoms.com on the advantages of the new system.

Plugins

One thing we warn all sites against is something we call ‘pluginitis’ which is where a site owner keeps adding various plugins, some of which may interact with one another in unexpected ways.  We believe that most sites rarely need more than ten or so plugins to function in a way that is suitable for needs.

We supply a set of Interconnect IT only plugins, which add news specific functionality and optimisations to WordPress, such as theme specific image resizing, alternative post titles, category selection, and standfirst capabilities.  These plugins are only available from Interconnect IT for projects that we lead, and are not available through third parties.

We also selected various plugins which were already available in the GPL sphere which added appropriate functionality, such as Lester Chan’s popular WP-Polls Plugin, the Add This social bookmarking plugin, and WordPress Popular Posts amongst others.  All were selected and tested for performance, reliability and quality before being applied.  Other plugins were also used, but most required modification to fulfil their requirements and we expect to feed this code back into the community in due course.

One thing that we never do, and for which there is rarely any need, is to modify the WordPress core.  This helps reduce maintenance issues and costs in the future.

Hosting & Performance

The Telecoms.com site in all its glory, showing the richness of content on the front page - there are many other similar pages on the site

For hosting, systems administration and load testing we worked with Kumina N.L. who have since become a company with which we partner by choice.  They provided a robust four way, load balanced hosting solution and carried out load-testing to ensure the servers were capable of handling peak traffics that can come to any news site.  The infrastructure relies on a Debian based AMP stack and has proven to be extremely robust.

One thing we did learn is that when content is pulled from a third party site (for example, adverts) site loading times can be slowed by factors outside your control.  To resolve this in future implementations of such sites Interconnect IT is in the process of developing post-loading technology which will create a widget that seeks external content only after all other important content has been loaded rather than using the conventional approach of loading content in strict order.

Traffic Growth

Although actual figures for Telecoms.com’s traffic are confidential business information, they have told us that after two months visitor numbers and page views have grown by approximately 30% to 50%, depending on the metrics used.  The analytics suggest that site ’stickiness’ and engagement have increased markedly thanks to the improved design, adoption of threaded comments (allowing for discussions to take place on news), most popular news information, and related content teasers.

WordPress Advantages

WordPress has succeeded in becoming a successful blogging platform over the past six years, but beyond that it has started to show the flexibility of the framework it provides.  The ease of use required by bloggers, coupled with a sophisticated theme and plugin framework has allowed the system to go far beyond its original means.

When good developers mix with WordPress the results can be impressive and help to create professional news sites for budgets that, including development and implementation, often cost less than the traditional CMS systems once used.  As a consequence interest in WordPress has mushroomed significantly.  While interest is still primarily focussed on use of WordPress for blogging platforms, Telecoms.com has shown its power when used as a news platform also.

By comparison [to the previous system], Wordpress is a dream, and the best thing is, less technical users find it intuitive and easy to get along with. As a successful blogging platform you can tell a lot of time and effort has been invested in making it a slick and productive tool, and that translates well when using it as a business CMS too.

James Middleton

Support & Maintenance

Since going live the system has proven to be robust and simple to use.  In fact, it proved so robust that there was no need for an ongoing support contract from us for our code.  This is often the case with our work and we make little money from support - while this may seem like poor business sense, we believe that building for reliability and performance helps us to keep our clients coming back to us time and time again.  We anticipate working with Informa on future projects.

Conclusion

WordPress, coupled with Interconnect IT’s additional technology has led to a strong, high-performance website which has significantly exceeded the expectations of the client.  WordPress has now proven itself as a platform for content far beyond blogging at Informa and we believe they are now likely to use the platform on future projects.  Since then, Interconnect IT has been approached by, and entered into discussions with, a number of other news organisations with a view to developing WordPress usage within their organisations.

Sniff Petrol is an anarchic motor industry and motorsport satire site

Overview

1. Over 120,000 posts viewed per week
2. Well controlled costs
3. High availability
4. Large peaks in traffic handled well when a new ‘edition’ is released
5. Highly responsive site

Analysis

Sniff Petrol is a well known and highly regarded satirical site with its focus on motorsport and the car industry. After six years, however, updating the site had increasingly become something of a chore for the site owner.

At this point friends had recommended producing a blog style site. Unfortunately, creating an attractive and interesting blog theme that moved the design of the site forwards rather than backwards had proved problematic for Sniff Petrol. This is where Interconnect IT were able to become involved, solving a whole raft of problems.

The problems solved can easily be listed:

1. Difficulty in making updates
2. Lack of creative freedom
3. Having to maintain a separate archive page by hand
4. A need for a more modern design that connects with the old site
5. RSS Feeds to allow visitors to keep up with changes to the site
6. Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

We also wanted to make sure that the site could be accessible to the widest range of users possible, using many different platforms.

With these criteria in mind, we created a standard blog layout with floating panels for the content, lying on an orange ‘page’, and with navigation elements shown on the page through cut-out panels. This gives the site a contemporary, layered feel.

Elements on the site are now managed dynamically - so for example, if the owner wishes to create a new category for articles, it won’t appear in the navigation panel until it’s populated with content. Then, if a visitor selects this category, it is highlighted, helping the visitor to know where in the site they’ve found themselves.

The underlying publishing platform is WordPress, a popular blogging and web publishing tool that’s put many millions of websites online. By plugging into its APIs we are able to add extra functionality without causing legacy problems in the future.

WordPress allows a range of blogging functions which help the professional blogger - for example, the ability to post date features means that content can be published automatically once the date has arrived. Useful for embargoed press releases, for example.  This helps Sniff Petrol to batch output up ready for editions, which is the working method preferred for the site.

Other useful facilities include the ability to assign posts to different ‘users’ - on Sniff Petrol a users like Crazy Dave Coulthard, D.I. Blundell and Carcoat Damphands have been defined, and posts can then be written with them as the author.

Traffic Improvement

In order to deal with the greater technical requirements of the new site, as well as ensuring higher availability and regular backups, it was decided to move everything on to Interconnect IT’s servers. The initial load was high, with over 6,000 visitors per day within just a few days. People around the world quickly learned that there was a new version of the site and traffic climbed exponentially at first. A sudden increase in traffic can sometimes be disastrous to a blog, but our well specified server barely noticed the change.

Overall, with like-on-like comparisons, the site has seen an increase in visits by over 100% - measured in the short term. It’s likely that due to the more regularly updated content that, in the long term, the site’s traffic will grow considerably.

Months Later…

Site traffic continued to climb, and is now steadily at 600% over the original visitor levels. This meant some tweaking to maintain server performance and keep bandwidth bills reasonable. This huge increase in visitors has happened because not only is the site updated more regularly than before, it’s also easier to keep track off - there are 3,000 visits a day from RSS readers alone.

In 2009…

The site is continuing to perform and grow. Sniff Petrol’s use of Twitter, coupled with a Twitter widget in the sidebar, has helped bring the site to a new audience. Updates ended up going back to a monthly basis, but the ease of use with WordPress means that the site’s owner continues to enjoy posting to it on a regular basis.

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 709 7977 (+44 151 709 7977 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

A visually sophisticated site, delivered in record time

Overview

Politics & The City is a multi-blog WordPress MU based site where a large number of contributors have created an online news system aimed at the female market.  The site needed to be implemented in a short period of time, with no room for delays due to the already planned and paid for publicity campaign.

Analysis

For a change, a site where didn’t carry out the visual design ourselves. Instead we were supplied mock-ups and a basic design brief from Black & Ginger, which we then turned into a living, breathing, news website using our WordPress skills to help make a dynamic site easy to manage even for staff who were new to content managed websites.

Key problems solved in the creation of Politics & The City can easily be listed:

1. Performance - the site will be expected to receive large spikes in traffic
2. Ease of expansion
3. Ease of use and content management
4. High standards of presentation
5. Ease of control over the site’s features
6. Highly demanding implementation schedule (three weeks!)
7. Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

It quickly became apparent that the best way forward would be a WordPress MU site, with a custom portal theme and then other themes with shared elements to be used elsewhere in the site. Cost was an issue as it was the first significant online project for June Sarpong MBE, the lady behind the site.

Hosting Challenges

The first major issue to deal with was the unusual server requirements. The clients had already made a deal with SUN (with their Startup Essentials package) prior to approaching Interconnect IT. As a consequence, the WordPress MU install had to be on a Solaris AMP stack, rather than the more usual Linux based stack we deal with. However, apart from a couple of initial hiccups, we quickly solved the problems and moved on to the install.

Rapid Yet Sophisticated Development

At the same time, development was moving quickly. We built and created a range of themes all of which added functionality. The portal itself was largely widget driven, and the different sites had writing options that allowed the user to specify whether the content should appear on the front page or not. If so, the theme would create suitably sized image variants for the front page, and then apply a suitable mask. Easy and simple for the writers to understand.

With deadlines so short, we had to rely on our accumulated IP, which helped us create something more than most rivals could manage. Being WordPress specialists helped hugely. In the end, we crafted the basis for a major site. And when the site was linked to from simply everywhere on the first day, the software performed admirably - only troubled by slow DNS propagation and caching issues which are typical problems when a site is given a big launch just hours after going live.

Key Learning Points

1. The actual hosting for the site was probably overspecified for the requirements, but we weren’t involved in this decision.  We would say that for the traffic experienced by the site a typical commodity based dedicated server, perhaps with a front-end cache, is perfectly adequate.  Our own server attracts approximately the same amount of traffic but is a relatively basic machine in comparison.  However, the SUN based solution does allow for a great deal of future traffic.  Our own view is that for single sites, server migrations are relatively straightforward and most sites could do with saving money on their serving solutions.

2. The designs were supplied as Adobe Illustrator files, but as high resolution 300dpi files.  Screens run at much lower resolutions (typically 72dpi-105dpi) and consequently all the graphics had to be recreated by us, so adding considerably to our workload.  Designers should try to work with Adobe Fireworks or, failing that, Photoshop or Illustrator in pixel modes.

3. Three weeks is not quite enough time for a project with this much custom work and required 14hr working days, seven days a week, in order to provide the results as requested.

4. For most smaller projects a lot of time and money can be saved by using ready-prepared dedicated servers from companies such as Namesco, as opposed to bare-box solutions from high-end companies.  Bare box solutions, whilst flexible and easy to work with for experts, require high quality systems administration and this is a service we do not provide.  Consequently, the need to recruit a systems administrator with specific skills can sometimes be expensive.

5. Developers don’t always get any of the credit…but they’re tucked away in the CSS files, if you know where to find them!

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 709 7977 (+44 151 709 7977 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

Danbar Drilling needed a high quality website to help cement their market-leading position

Danbar Drilling required a website that would put them above their rivals - they wanted a site that was better designed, had excellent browser compatibility, and was easy for them to work with.

We delivered a WordPress based solution designed to have a striking front page with key product points, with a news section becoming visible to those surfing more deeply into the site.

The visual look and feel of the site was designed in-house, using images supplied by Danbar Drilling, and the structure was proposed following several meetings with the Danbar management team.  The site uses a banded design, allowing brief introductory copy, along with a suitable representative image, to show in the top band, with more detail below.

Since implementing the site, Danbar Drilling have recorded a number of interesting enquiries along with potential recruits submitting CVs using the job submission form.  This is helping to streamline their processes.  The site is still very new and it will be interesting to see how it develops over the coming months.

Visit the Danbar Drilling site.

Screenshots

Danbar Home Page

Danbar Job Application Form

Visit the Danbar Drilling site.

Politics & The City is a WordPress MU based site with productivity tools added

For a change, a site we didn’t design. Instead we were supplied mock-ups and a basic design brief from the Liverpool design agency Black & Ginger, which we then turned into a living, breathing, news website using our WordPress skills to help make a dynamic site easy to manage even for relatively untrained staff.

Key problems solved in the creation of Politics & The City can easily be listed:

• Performance - the site will be expected to receive large spikes in traffic
• Ease of expansion
• Ease of use and content management
• High standards of presentation
• Ease of control over the site’s features
• Highly demanding implementation schedule (three weeks!)
• Analytics to allow monitoring of traffic and to see which features are most popular

If you’d like a site like this one, why not contact us on 0151 709 7977 (+44 151 709 7977 from outside the UK) or complete our contact form for a free initial consultation.

Visit the Politics & The City site.

Screen Shots:

Please note that certain flash elements haven’t been correctly rendered by our screen shot software - to see everything in action, visit Politics & The City.

Politics & The City Home Page

Inside one of the many Politics & The City Blogs

Telecoms.com is considered to be the telecoms industry’s leading news, opinion and analysis website. It is produced by the Telecoms & Media group within Informa plc - a major operator in the information business with over 8000 staff in over 40 countries.

Thanks to Interconnect IT’s significant WordPress skills and extensions, coupled with the system’s ease of use, it was quickly decided that this open source software would be an excellent fit for the requirements that Informa Telecoms & Media had listed. These ranged from support for multiple contributors with varying access rights, tagging, category templates, sections and so on.

The added functionality that Interconnect IT brings to WordPress, including a multitude of news specific widgets, quick and easy section page creation and so on helped create a highly flexible website that can easily grow without a need to repeatedly involve the developers. This strength helps to give Telecoms.com an advantage in being able to quickly respond to changes in the business environment they work with.

Matt Horsford, Head of New Media at Informa Telecoms & Media said “Interconnect IT were one of the few people in the UK able to deliver WordPress functionality to the level we required. The project ran smoothly and we were impressed at the way Interconnect IT understood and executed our requirements with very little need to make further changes.”

The visual design of the site was carried out by Coast Digital.

Media Orientated WordPress

Interconnect IT believe that WordPress’s underlying structure, coupled with the correct theme and our own custom plugin set makes for a platform that is excellent for media outlets such as Informa. David Coveney, Director of Interconnect IT said “The semantic and chronological structure of WordPress content was originally designed for blogging, but it also perfectly matches the needs of media organisations who have a lot of news to present. The wide range of ways in which media can be presented, coupled with the multitude of RSS feeds available makes for an immersive, high performing news website.”

WordPress is currently used by many large media groups for blogging, with some starting to exploit its power for news websites. The largest growth sector for WordPress is likely to be in news websites for both small and large organisations. Early adopters such as the New York Times, CNN and our own clients at Politics & The City (run by June Sarpong MBE) have shown the real benefits in using this technology. Telecoms.com have shown great foresight in adopting WordPress for their own site and should gain another advantage over their competition.

Telecoms.com is an example of using WordPress as an entire website news platform.

When we were approached by Informa Telecoms & Media, part of the FTSE 250 listed Informa corporation with an expression of interest in using WordPress for their entire site we weren’t sure what to expect.  A lot of companies ask us about using the platform for blogging, but although we’d done the groundwork for using WordPress as a news platform interest was still quite low until late 2008.

We were excited to see that a major news and information group was taking an interest in WordPress, having successfully used it as a blogging platform.  It seems that blogging has been a great way for WordPress to enter companies, and the system has evolved full CMS capabilities in time for these same companies to be able to consider implementing WordPress site-wide.

Informa are one of the first companies in the UK to make a full move into using WordPress.  To help them do this we developed a range of solutions for their site, going beyond their expectations and delivering a functionally rich WordPress solution that within two months has already increased page views and visitor numbers by between 30% and 50%. In particular we addressed certain workflow and flexibility requirements that pushed WordPress way beyond its original blogging roots and deep into the CMS capabilities it now has.

Everything that’s been built does exactly what we asked for, and in some cases goes beyond. The whole set up is very versatile and all works in a logical manner. I feel comfortable explaining the workings of the site to other users now. And the best thing is that I don’t have to involve another team and put maintenance requests in if it’s something I can do myself, making life much easier.

James Middleton, Managing Editor of Telecoms.com

Visit the Telecoms.com site or read the Telecoms.com case study

Home Page New & Old:

Telecoms.com Home Page

Telecoms.com original Home Page

TV Section New & Old

Telecoms.com TV Section

Telecoms.com original TV Section

Opinion Pages and Magazine Download Pages

Telecoms.com Opinion Section

Telecoms.com Magazine Section

Visit the Telecoms.com site.

Willows Mallorca are a Mallorca based property management company who came to us over two years ago for a budget site.  They’d taken over the company but the web presence they inherited wasn’t suitable.  The site we created then was basic, but carefully built and with good search engine performance - in fact, the results were remarkable.  Willows Mallorca have since grown to a team of seven staff, with a showroom office, and high-flying clients.  It’s been estimated that as much as 70% of their work came through their website.

Following that kind of performance, it’s no surprise that they wanted to stay with us!  Our belief in high quality along with great value mean we very rarely lose a client.