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TNT Magazine relaunches after the Selesti treatment
TNT Publications produce dozens of fantastic entertainment and travel magazines. They appointed Selesti to deliver a huge publishing solution to manage their online presence; a scalable multi-site CMS for all their titles with shared functionality and features.
TNT pioneered free distribution in the UK in 1983, for the last 25 years the brand has expanded into a multi-platform media company attracting a young, active audience with a zest for life and money to spend on living it to the full!
TNT’s brief to Selesti was initially to produce a powerful, flexible and user friendly multi-site CMS which allows collaborative editorial process across five continents with version control, rollback and content locking. All text and images had to be a stylishly displayed and sit within a flexible set of design templates which can accommodate dozens of layouts and reusable interface widgets. We opted to build a solution which allowed their editors options to create any combination of layouts they wished and manage, add and edit an unlimited amount of interface widgets which they can share across all of their sites.
We also had to integrate with dozens of 3rd party API solutions including Property feeds, a Job Search Engine, Rich Media Advertising and Social Network channels.
Further development for Ecommerce, Job Search, Accommodation and Property Classifieds all integrated won the job hands down given our experience with pioneering creative digital platforms. We showed we could accommodate the extensive and varied content TNT offer ranging from News and Entertainment to Worldwide travel guides, all individually tailored to their target readership. We demonstrated that our CMS framework would cater for their specific and at times elaborate preview, rollback and versioning requirements up and down their editor/contributor hierarchy.
From a clunky, bloated and antiquated CMS with limited functionality, we have transformed administering the sites into a much more manageable experience. TNT staff have the flexibility to produce richer, engaging content which looks stunning, loads faster, is easier to find and enthuses user engagement.
Our conceptual design muscles have been flexing as we’ve produced a huge number of layouts and styles to be deployed and amended as required. The Gallery module is one such example, which showcases hundreds of thousands of beautiful photos. We were able to execute some technical sleight of hand through an Event system utilising Google Maps plus ticketing purchase functionality.
We had to go through an exhaustive and absolutely necessary IA phase to ensure all aspects of content, structure, functionality and integration were covered before we touched a line of code or conceptual design. This process was invaluable given the complexity and sheer number of interfaces needed to present content, navigation and features to the user. The project had over 500 wireframes to cover all eventualities.
Add to this that the existing site was built in an ancient form of code known as ‘ASP’. We called in the historians and Tony Robinson and eventually managed to extract 1.5 million rows of data (no exaggeration) from the old database. As expected, this was riddled with inaccuracies, duplication and malformed rubbish. The data was a mash up of embedded media, site content and membership info. We had to build a sophisticated import portal to cut through the fat and only bring to the new site what was of value to TNT.
With so many sections of content, each required its own touches of finesse and usability to ensure the user journey was seamless and logical. A comprehensive permissions module in the CMS manages their preview and publish process - we listened to their existing offline approval process for content going live and automated these steps.
The end product is a site which allows complete content, structural and design control by TNT. They can add new sites within a matter of hours, share content, preview and publish, adding and editing functionality and user control.
User membership offers customers the ability to engage with other members, post jobs, accommodation, classifieds, add events, find a date, comment and share content and manage their profile in one place for all TNT sites.
Editorial staff can tag, move and assign content, with powerful SEO tools enabling them to ensure maximum organic placement. Meta data is generated automatically wherever possible, with intelligent auto suggest features cutting down time to optimise their pages. User and bot - friendly URLs are formed from the content along with page titles and descriptions populated immediately without a click required from the author.
Site membership has increased by 33% since launch. Traffic to the site has exceeded all expectations and gets tens of thousands of visitors each day, the homepage has received over 1,100 likes on Facebook With the increased membership and site visitors also comes huge monetisation opportunities. TNT’s online advertising has many new exclusive sponsorship deals and is enjoying an increase in CPM revenue.
One of the key results is the administration of content which is now streamlined with a workflow which is faster, efficient and lets the editorial team concentrate on producing ideas and content rather than get bogged down with problematic input and uploads.
Visit: http://www.tntmagazine.com/
