As a freelance member of the Innovative Publishing Company virtual team, I had the opportunity to take their online publishing presence to the next level by moving from a less-than-flexible, proprietary .NET platform to a customized WordPress theme and set of plugins.
The entire user experience was transformed from a single list of published articles, and rarely used site features to an intuitive reading experience, collecting articles by topic areas, and quickly distinguishing News, Features, and Opinion Columns. With input from the other virtual team members, the new site architecture was built using WordPress as it’s base, utilizing both off-the-shelf, open-source plugins as well as plugins and widgets I built specifically for the project. With the assistance of a more advanced developer, for some of the more complex programming required, the launch of the new MedTechIntelligence.com was launched in July 2015.
Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers (Google DFP) was integrated into the redevelopment, allowing for more targeted ad delivery than the previous system allowed. Additional enhancements such as XML sitemaps and Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP HTML) have added to the continued growth of the revised web property.
Taking advantage of the redevelopment process, Innovative Publishing rebranded their medical device news service with a new name and focus. This rebranding added a degree of difficulty to the overall process, making sure that the news service’s current SERPs would transfer to the new property.
As part of the redevelopment, I addressed the newsletter subscription model, taking MedTechIntelligence from behind a registration wall, to open content, with an optional subscription to newsletters. Both subscription opt-ins and site traffic have increased significantly since the changes were put into place in mid-2015.
A completely redesigned email newsletter template capped off the redevelopment process, matching the look and feel of the new MedTechIntelligence product, providing readers with a quick summary of recent articles published on the site.
With the process, theme, and requirements hammered out, work began on Innovative Publishing’s second web property FoodSafetyTech, and a new property: CannabisIndustryJournal.
