Lessons learned: reduce your development overhead and increase commercial inventory

Emap Inform and Webvision

Conor Dignam

Group editor and director of media,

Emap Inform

Emap Inform – weekly titles on WebVision

Our Objectives

•Create websites to reflect our brands

•Enhance user experience

•Improving online content offering

•Increasing commercial inventory

•Improve use of online by editorial teams

•Reducing overall costs around web build/IT support

Where we were a few years ago

•We built all our editorial websites ourselves

• In-house development

•Different sites doing different things

•Little prioritisation of development/projects

•Some weeklies had weak web presence

•Limited commercial inventory

Our resources (roughly)

•In-house web and IT resource

•Six to eight developers

•Three testers

•Three designers (or more)

•Project managers

•Admin support

•Management Total: north of £500k

Digital questions

•We were not happy

•Projects had gone wrong and were costing time and money

•We needed digital acceleration/investment

•Build or buy?

•Revamp internal resource or acquire CMS?

Digital Decisions

•We decided to buy

•We bought badly (not WebVision)

•Not the supplier’s fault

•We bought with a build mentality

• “Can it do this?”

•“Well, yes it can, if we develop it”.

We bought again – but better

•We asked the journalists what was really important to them from a CMS

•We looked for something already working in a similar environment to ours

•We wanted something that worked “out of the box”

What our journalists wanted…

•Control over the content

•Speed of publication and newsletters

•Simple and intuitive workflow

•Ability to move content around easily

•Compatible with PCs and Macs

•Multiple content types; news, blogs, forums, video and picture galleries

•Everything the journalists wanted

•Ability to integrate CMS with other systems

•CMS that worked out of the box

•No major customisation

•Could be delivered in a tight timeframe

•Would provide benefits of scale

What the Emap Inform team wanted

What we did next

•We bought Webvision – we knew other B2B publishers had used it

•White label approach across business

•Standardised wireframes

•Standardised advertising inventory

•Standardised functionality for each site

•“Can it do this?” – No it can’t.

ScreenDaily.com

Broadcastnow.co.uk

Nce.co.uk

Architectsjournal.co.uk

What else we did with Webvision

•Trained super-users across the business

•Ensured the workflow made sense

•Integrated with Madgex for jobs

•Training programme for journalists and sales people

•Optimised for SEO

Where we are now

Broadcast as an example:

November 2009:

Page impressions up 33% YoY

Unique users up 77% YoY

Newsletter registrations up 30%

Group digital ad revenues up by almost 60%

Journalists doing what they do best

•More journalists now using the CMS

•More content than ever going online

•Savings from reducing time required for repurposing print copy for online etc

•We do things quicker and better

•NT web editor, Gabriel Fleming, web editor of the year at BSME awards

Innovation continuing

•Sites add HTML where they need to “customise the sites themselves”

•Twitter feeds and financial feeds in spin blocks through RSS

•Development of new sites built for us and then bolted on to the WebVision CMS.

•CN Insight for Construction News – TCI for Broadcastnow.

Our resource now

•Emap Inform’s current sites:

•One developer

•Two support/testers

•One designer (mostly email for sales/marketing)

•One manager

•Roughly £250k

Conclusion

•The white label solution can work for sites that have similar core requirements

•Select carefully – but very big benefits to single CMS across multiple brands

•Further development of overall sites will probably mean a hybrid solution – of build and buy

Emap Inform and WebVision

Questions?