Erlensee Aktuell
2014 — Today
Webdevelopment
User Experience Design
Erlensee Aktuell is a digital news outlet single-handedly operated by it's founder Markus Sommerfeld. While content itself wasn't a problem for the site, modern technological standards were.
20 full Seconds
The site was struggling to load properly, since all it's contents were loaded on visit, including a lot of uncompressed images and JavaScript. Markus himself even had issues with his publishing workflow, in whichintegrating some of the content he had on hand due to the outdated Content-Management-System he had built his website on. To top it all off the site was lacking a responsive version in 2014, to the discontent of many users.
Content is king
Mentally sketching a blueprint for the framework we decided that a layout change was inevitable with responsiveness and a CMS change on the horizon. This opened up the possibility for a few more improvements regarding presentation opportunities for the local advertising partners and structure.
Since articles found on Erlensee Aktuell aren't supposed to be high-end editorial content the focus of the redesign was readability and improving structure to be closer to traditional newspapers and bigger news outlets.
Another aspect inspired by traditional print media was the front page separation into sections for Erlensee itself and other regions. This way users have the ability to spot newer entries for whatever region they are in, while also being able to see what's new elsewhere in the area.
Advertisement Expansion
To improve the profitability of creating content for Markus, who writes the articles next to his full-time job we came up with new opportunities for the sites partners to promote their businesses. The new prime spot to display ads now is the slider at the top of the frontpage, where more prominent articles and news about the site's partners appear in a shuffled order.
The sidebar, which before had contained multiple animated sliders of banners, got an overhaul to make it less obnoxious while reading. The positions are now only shuffled upon page loads and are separated into bigger higher ranking and averagely sized lower ranking banners. With a location higher up you also gain the ability to have banners in a single position switching their content with each page refresh.
To further attract attention to the articles about partnering businesses, the bottom of standard articles now includes excerpts and images of pieces referring to recent news of that segment.
Last Minute
Development started off on a local Vagrant instance which, in the mean time, has been replaced by an instance of the Docker container system. As for the CMS change it was a simple decision: I had some experience with WordPress, it covered everything Markus wished for in publishing routine and offers an extensive plugin system, which allowed us to reduce costs for features that we could simply install.
Over the course of 6 months we were able to keep a tight feedback loop and share early prototypes through tunneling so my local development instance could be tested directly. But wouldn't it be too nice if things always go smoothly? Apparently yes, because the old Joomla 1.3 instance the site was running on before got hacked 2 weeks ahead of the planned launch.
The premature launch went surprisingly well and caused a lot more traffic, than the shared Apache server could handle. Luckily FBMS Hosting was quick to help with the move to their servers. As a result we saw great benefits in terms of reliability and load times.
Conclusion
The reboot of Erlensee Aktuell was well received by users, partners and stakeholders alltogether. In terms of technical benefit there are huge improvements to summarize:
- 20 → 3sload time reduction
- 10k → 30kindividual page visits per month
- 2xrevenue
