Liveblog: Relaunching The Look.co.uk Website

The first iteration of Look was very very simple, with two developers, and three pages. It ‘was a bit of a placeholder’. The magazine itself started doing very well, so they decided to relaunch the site.

They had to go to an external agency for the next redesign, because of a lack of inhouse resource. But, ‘and its a fairly big but’ - it was an external agency. That meant it was quick to do, but it was an unknown, proprietary CMS, and that started to cause a lot of problems. Poor SEO, difficult to maintain in house. It was costly. It didn’t do what they needed - and it was difficult to customise.

They then decided to do another redesign. This time they had a small in-house team - a mix of staff and contractors. “You can’t have a pure contractor team - because when they go the knowledge goes, but you also can’t have a pure staff team, because there isn’t the breadth of knowledge”.

They ended up with a tight deadline because of needing to launch before a major event for the magazine. That meant a 3.5 month build.

They then had to decide on the framework to use. They narrowed the choice to Symphony, an in-house CMS built on Symphony, and Drupal. They chose Drupal.

Why Drupal

Drupal stood out because it was established with a lot of people working on the project. It’s modular, and there are plenty of modules being developed - you can often get a head start by building on someone else’s work. They also liked the community aspect, the access to knowledge.
Essentially Drupal gave them a lot more out of the box than other systems - allowing them to meet the tight deadline.

The Build

Most of what they used is out of the box core and contrib and, says Tom ‘It just worked’. They used Agile project management, generating user stories, creating documentation as they went, having daily stand-up meetings (essentially Scrum). They do a ‘slightly not agile thing’ by specifying the foundations of he project at the start - their analogy “when you build a house you don’t build the kitchen first, and then work out how to build the bathroom - you need to put in the base plumbing first”

They did a lot of prototyping, and found Drupal great for this - ‘it lets you play around with the site a bit’.

Information Architecture was something they considered to be very important, and they spent some time definining this - both for usability, and SEO. So URL’s are, for example ‘/celebrity/rihanna/pictures’ with a ‘celebrity’ page giving news of all celebrities, then a page for each celebrity with news about them, then a page for all pictures of that celebrity.

They used the Acquia distribution of Drupal, which included:

• CCK
• Image
• ImageCache
• Views
• Pathauto
• Google Analytics

Other contributed modules they used were:

• Node Gallery (looking back now they’d have built their own using views)
• Cache Router

Custom modules were also used:

• Competitions - this had to be flexible to allow for lots of different competition types, and to be very secure. They plan to refactor this and release it to the community.
• IPC - a custom module to make basic alterations.

The Launch

They launched on-time and on-budget. The site is now fast - they use Memcache, as well as Akamai as a CDN to help with this. They doubled the page impressions within hours - because people could navigate the site more easily. The SEO has worked really well - if you google ‘fashion’ in the UK they are now the top listing.

Issues included the fact that there was no master/slave replication - causing stress for sysadmins. They’ve now swapped core for Pressflow.

They’re really happy with it, have had great feedback from the publishing teams, and have found it easy to extend with new features.

One point Tom makes is that it was really important to bring in external Drupal expertise - otherwise they’d have ended up with problems.

Questions

One question was around updates to Drupal core and modules. he says that this has been reasonably straightforward - but the trouble is with configuration in the database - so they’re looking at copying the Economist’s approach of putting SQL updates into a Drupal modules update hooks, and then running the update on that module.

Do you have an editorial workflow system? At the moment anyone can publish on the site. They may look at an editorial workflow later.