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?

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Lessons learned: reduce your development overhead and increase commercial inventory

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