Portfolio

Comedy.com

Funniest Online Content Network

Comedy.com was looking for a complete overhaul of their niche humor blog network: design, functionality, flexibility, and cohesiveness. We created a new, consistent look for the sites and used WordPress to keep all the content in one easy-to-manage system. The new system gives them more cohesive site management, better integrated properties, and easier administration. We've since continued to work closely with Comedy.com as the site has evolved.

Complimenting their design

The folks at Comedy had a good sense of how they wanted the site pages to work and a new branding direction. It was up to us to integrate these into a new site design. We went through a few rounds of revisions for the home page, interior pages, and archive listings and arrived at a strong yellow color scheme and bold styling to compliment their new logo.

Niche blogs with their own personality

With dozens of niche blogs dedicated to different humor topics, Comedy was looking for consistency with some customization. Using WordPress MU, each blog is able to act as a unique property with it's own editors, content producers, third-party links, and sidebar widgets spotlighting featured content. This also allows for site-specific ad management, comments settings, Twitter URLs, header logos, favicons, and so on.

Moving with a forwarding address

One tricky part about moving dozens of sites from one platform (Blogger) to another (WordPress MU) is making sure the old content is imported correctly, and that future requests are redirected to the right place. Luckily, WordPress has a built-in Blogger importer. We've also developed a redirection plugin that, by doing a 301 redirect from the old site, serves posts based on where the request originated; the original permalink structure doesn't matter.

User submitted links

Using third-party submission plugins, users are able to send an email directly to the Comedy.com staff to submit a link to be considered. Visitors can also submit links to be listed in a community-owned sidebar widget to immediately spotlight fresh content.

Aggregating the network

By leveraging WordPress multi-site features we built a custom site-wide content feed. Seen on the home page, the feed displays the most recent content across the entire network and blogs can be editorially added or removed from the feed. These changes are ultimately reflected in a master RSS feed separate from the individual niche blogs' feeds.

Custom network search

With such a large network there is often a need to find a specific piece of content. That funny video clip may have been posted to the YouTube blog or the Celebrities blog. With a Google Custom Search Engine, the user is handed results from the site they're currently browsing. In addition, all of the most relevant results across the entire network appear immediately below.

Simple management with custom widgets

Sprinkled throughout the site are custom sidebar "widgets" and features that allow Comedy.com to spotlight funny content and links to other sites. After discussions with Comedy.com to determine their requirements and needed flexibility, we created some to allow editorial control and some that are automated to show recent updates.

No site is ever complete

A site is never finished, only launched. We continue to work closely with Comedy.com and add new features to the site to adapt to the always changing publishing landscape. Using version control and a staging server allows us to quickly make changes and stage them for review before pushing to the live site.

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