Web-tan-forum

By Hidehisa on 26 May 2015

Web-tan-forum is online media for webmasters and digital marketers in Japan, managed by a publishing company Impress Corporation.

Everyone can read articles, manga (story comic), and news for topics like SEO, Web analytics, CMS, UX, Ads, Marketing, and business.

Web-tan-forum was started on July 2006, and is one of the most large and reliable media for these topics. All content is for free and our income is through advertisement (online / offline).

New articles are published daily, the website holds more than 20k+ articles and 400k+ unique users monthly, at the point of case study (May 2015).

Visit web-tan.forum.impressrd.jp →

Why Drupal was chosen:

We first considered using phpbb as a CMS to make readers join conversation, but after our director checked some CMS like Movable Type and opensource ones like Plone, Mambo etc, we decided to use Drupal (4.x).

The key points we selected Drupal is:

I had heared (at Pubcon Las Vegas) that Drupal is good CMS that NASA and whitehouse was using.
Opensource, it means free of cost and free to customize.
It is flexible framework, not a mere CMS.

Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):

Was Drupal good selection?

Definitely yes. I'm the editor in chief since release and I am greatly satisfied the decision our director made.

Our goal is to provide good information for webmasters and web marketers, making good articles, with limited resources (2-3 editors and quite small budget).

Drupal allowed us to create well-designed articles using complex HTML and CSS, on the other hand, it allows our news-writes to create simple news articles without any knowledge of HTML.

The site now 200+ sections (series and features) and each section has each design, withdrupal's flexisibility.

When an author requested us not to put ads on the pages for their article, of course I could say "OK, it's easy task".

When an PR agency asked us to deliver their press-releases, I could say "OK, please provide data with RSS, I will customize aggregator module to handle them".

When an editor says editing page is not easy to use, I could say "OK, I'll customize them for you".

All custom modules and themes are developed in-house. It is because:

BAD: There were not good Drupal-able agencies in Japan at 2006 (now we have some).
GOOD: I can do it all by myself with source codes, information on drupal.org, and many modules as a teacher

In fact, there are 1 designer and 1 developer (me) in-house, and it's enough to build and keep managing media site.