New Project Launch: Stray Ferret
19 August 2024
We are thrilled to announce that Show + Tell has welcome Stray Ferret as a new client.
The Stray Ferret is a trusted news service providing quality local journalism across Harrogate, Knaresborough, Ripon, and beyond. A reliable source of information is vital for community advocacy and voicing public opinion.
They hold power to account with daily breaking news and in-depth investigative reporting on serious issues. Show + Tell are proud to be able to help create a new platform to celebrate the area's achievements, highlight upcoming events, and champion local individuals and businesses.
What were the project goals set at the start of the project:
The main goals were to solve legacy issues affecting the Stray Ferret online presence which were:
Have the ability to send push notifications to reader for breaking news stories.
Server downtime; a solution to make the site more robust during peak traffic spikes and ensure zero downtime.
Switch to an impression based advertising model which is the way many modern online news outlets are going.
Improve the user experience of the site to drive high engagement levels for the audience.
Why where Show + Tell selected as the partner to deliver the project?
They demonstrated experience delivering high traffic web platform for brands such as MTV, UNESCO and Candy Kittens so we were confident in their capability from this aspect. Their design portfolio was very impressive with multiple awards wins for user experience design and innovation. It's important for us to support local and being an agency from Harrogate part of our selection process as it meant communication and collaboration throughout the project would be easier especially with a deadline to meet!
Were there any specific challenges or obstacles during the implementation phase?
The architecture of site is advanced in order to deal with large spikes in traffic during high demand period.
Historically the site had crashed under heavy loads but we re-engineered the front end using next.js as a lightweight solution causing less stress on servers and ensuring rapid page load speeds for the Stray Ferret readers on mobile, desktop and on the App.
The platform has multiple integrations with 3rd party platforms to power functionality such as Notifications, Subscriptions, Email Marketing and Payments for offers & events. Integrating multiple tools onto a single platform so they talk to each other required a thorough testing process prior to launch.
There was three clear improvement area's we focused on:
- CMS Capabilities
- Reader benefits
- Functionality: Subscription model & Impression based advertising
CMS Capabilities:
- Site uses a WordPress CMS and NextJS frontend
- A new site header/navigation will be designed & built for improved user experience. The CMS will enable add/edit and re-order of the new navigation.
- Home page/Latest news (with flexible CMS option to change order of block below the news feed) Option for the blocks below the main news feed to be drag & drop to change the page order when the SF require.
- Ability for people to be able to enable notifications on the website.
- The admin will be able to manually write each notification for full control and push this out to notification subscribers.
- Whats on - To bring on-site rather than being set up on a separate domain. Automated population of Paid and Community events
Reader Benefits
- Ability for users to expand images
- Ability to share stories
- Ability for subscribers to comment on articles
- Subscriber benefits such as exclusive offers, discounts and vouchers along with access to all the SF content
- Improved UX by making the site cleaner and in a better layout, easier on the eye for users Functionality
- Implemented a subscription model and paywall with the ability to turn this on/off for the whole site or just selected articles and offers
