Global Trade Publication

The challenge

The publication covers a worldwide manufacturing and recycling industry, with print and digital magazines, newsletters, an app and its own trade show. Its website was an unresponsive, table-based layout, built in ASP.NET by an agency on a budget of around £100,000.

Then the agency’s developers left. The publication had no access to the source code, the agency couldn’t make the fixes it needed, and nothing new could be added. In short, it was paying agency rates for a solution that didn’t need them.

Keeping them running

Without the source code, I started with careful short-term repairs to solve the most pressing problems. That bought time to plan a proper fix rather than a rushed one.

The rebuild

I rebuilt the site in WordPress with a responsive design, working in the background over about six months.

• 10,000+ stories moved. Exporting them from the old system was the hardest part, because of their number and how they were stored. Each was exported, processed and imported, with theme adjustments so older stories looked as close as possible to new ones.
• Links protected. Redirects kept old addresses working, so search rankings and links from other sites weren’t lost.
• Almost no downtime. Readers switched to the new site without interruption.
• Better advertising tools. With the author’s permission, I extended a WordPress advertising plugin to do what the publication needed. The author later added my changes to a public release of the plugin.

The rebuild cost about a tenth of the original build. I also helped the publication move to more capable hosting that cost about 90% less, and ongoing maintenance costs fell too.

Search: ranking where it mattered

The first phase was technical SEO: structured markup, site structure and backlinks, so the site ranked as well as possible on Google. It already did well there.

The real challenge was commercial. Advertisers judged the publication by its Alexa global ranking, and competitors ranked better on Alexa despite doing worse on Google. After research, I built a multi-part approach that tackled Alexa directly and also targeted the search engines that matter in two major markets for the industry: Baidu in China and Yandex in Russia.

The global ranking rose from around 1,150,000 to 229,000. That supported advertising revenue, and also helped bring in readers from those markets.

“[Mark’s] advice and guidance have seen our website rise in the global rankings from around 1,150,000 to 229,000. This is an absolutely incredible statistic to achieve with our limited budget and diverse audience needs.“

Managing Director

Beyond the website

• HTML web design. On the publication’s behalf, I restyled the website of a national trade association it worked with. They wanted a fresh look without a content management system, so the site was hand-coded in HTML and linked to the publication’s live newsfeed.
• HTML email templates. I hand-coded email templates for advertisers’ campaigns. They were laid out like posters with images, but still made sense when an email program blocked the images.
• Graphic design. Ongoing layout work for print and digital, the kind normally done at a printer. Once, I created a piece of artwork illustrating a career, as a retirement gift for one of the publication’s most important advertisers.

A long-term adviser

Beyond the projects, I was the publication’s go-to adviser for fourteen years. It was ad hoc: getting the best out of WordPress, software support, and higher-level SEO and marketing strategy, whenever a question came up.

Why it worked

I set up my previous business to give small and medium-sized businesses agency-quality service without agency prices. This client is a good example: expert work, delivered quickly, at a price that suited a small team with a global audience.