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By Third and Grove on
The Boston Herald Relaunches with a Slick New Design and Vastly Improved Performance
The Boston Herald is a popular daily online and print news source that has a wide weekday circulation. Like many media organizations that were originally print-only and have added a digital version, the Herald’s online presence required a major overhaul. With ever more of its users accessing the site from mobile devices, plus Google’s 2015 mobile-first mandate, the Herald’s digital team knew the time was right for a new responsive design and an update of the site’s archaic tech framework.
Innovation for the digital age
User expectations for digital performance, especially on mobile devices, are vastly more exacting than they were even five years ago. Unlike print media, the pace of technical change in the digital world is breakneck, and requires constant system upkeep. The Herald’s site presented some challenges not unfamiliar in the online news world, including a large amount of content to wrangle and a vast array of content types, which TAG tackled by recategorizing and reorganizing the site’s taxonomy. We also executed a responsive retheme that offers a sleek, infinite-edges design, better able to serve the needs of the paper’s online readership.
The Killer Feature - Reengineered performance
The Herald’s CMS and backend were outdated, which Third & Grove brought into line with current best practices and innovations. On the backend, we upgraded the code for the video player, which had extremely important positive implications for the site’s speed and general UX, as the original had a lot of heavy pages and ads that ran in video popups and dropdowns. TAG integrated DoubleClick for Publishers (DFP), Google’s ad serving and reporting toolkit for publishers, which has greatly helped the paper to streamline and track this all-important facet of the business.
We also reengineered their newsfeeds, which import thousands of articles every day from the likes of the Associated Press and Tribune International, for constant import on a short loop and to allow for more timely editing.
The Result
The changes have already been positively received by users and commented upon by the likes of Boston Magazine, and the Herald’s content managers are pleased with their improved editing experience.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The Boston Herald was already using Drupal, and we continued building on their long-term commitment to the Drupal platform.
Technical specifications
Drupal version:
Drupal 7.x
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
To efficiently handle one of the main functionalities for a news site, that of importing and distributing news feeds, we used Google AMP for caching, and extensive DFP integration.
The Feeds and Migrate modules are used to import and manage content from external systems and national sources.
ImageAPI Optimize is used to optimize each image on the site, reducing page load times.
Manual Crop allows editors control over how image styles crop.
Image Gallery View and Media Collection are used to handle image galleries for articles with multiple images.
Content Lock protects against simultaneous editing.
Nodequeue is used to queue up featured stories on section fronts.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Media
Publishing
