We started working with The Art Newspaper in 2015; migrating them over to a new Content Management System and website, building promotional campaigns, and supporting their digital tools.
Our close relationship helped us to understand their pain points and ambitions for their digital platforms. It became time to upgrade them from the system we had developed for them several years earlier. The goal: more powerful tools to manage their content and publish it in a variety of new ways.
Having built and maintained their previous system and migrating 30 years of data, we had in-depth knowledge of their content and how they worked with it. This fuelled our desire to create a more distinct identity for their website and give their editors more possibilities for curating their content.
Our initial focus was on the Fronts — a collection of articles and information. During the initial discussions with their editorial team, they emphasised the want to have more control over their homepage and other key pages.
Through a mix of automatic and manual aggregation, we created a system where their editors could create an endless amount of unique modules of content. There was a fine line between manual work and automation; not wanting them to be overworked with regular maintenance of each module, but enough flexibility to curate insightful collections of content for their readers.
The layout of the “front modules” depends on the number of articles in the module. The editors didn’t need to stress over a set of requirements and could give each module the amount of attention it deserved without being too tedious.
The flexibility of the system gave the editors the opportunity to enhance certain pages, such as author fronts, or leave them as the default layout.
We are very happy to have wearegoat as our long-term partner: they are stellar, when it comes to research-based solutions, solving complex problems in ever-changing environments, and creating solutions that actually work.
The content ranges from short news to lengthy feature pieces, and galleries to podcasts. The article templates and blocks of content available in the editor cater for all the different scales of content being produced.
After launching the new website and Content Management System we saw an increase in creativity from the editors. The fronts were being utilised; with front modules being created for trending topics and fronts being used to promote themes within the content.
The new experience is continuously being maintained and updated with new features and improvements.