Portfolio

VentureBeat

Online Publishing with WordPress

VentureBeat is one of the leading new media publishers serving “news and information about private companies and the venture capital that fuels them.” They approached us in early 2008 with their existing site and design and asked for additional features, new sections and a visual redesign. Additionally, we maintained an ongoing relationship to help support additional post-launch feature requests through mid-2009.

Ad and analytics management leaves time to write

VentureBeat doesn't want to spend time in the site's code when a new ad is needed or their analytics code needs to be tweaked. We've built a number of flexible plugins that allow for ad and analytics insertion. The plugins not only insert the custom code exactly where it needs to be, but also interfaces with the admin dashboard so that insertion is as simple as copy, paste, save.

Ongoing maintenance requires testing

Since Crowd Favorite is continually making changes and adding new features to the VentureBeat site we needed to setup a staging environment where both parties can test development. Not only do we maintain a separate WordPress instance, but we support version control with the use of a subversion repository. This way the multiple parties can make changes and not step on each other's toes.

Content treatment like none other

With various article types, guest columnists, wire articles, sponsored posts and so on, VentureBeat needed a solution that kept the different content separate. We developed custom category treatment for all these and more. For example, wire articles appear simply as a link. Sponsored posts appear on the homepage with different styling, but are excluded from partner RSS feeds. Conference posts appear in the RSS feed but stay off the homepage unless explicitly defined to.

Embedding rich content has never been easier

To simplify things, we created a plugin that allows VentureBeat to upload rich content and post it with a "snippet", or a short piece of code that acts as a placeholder. This makes for easier content editing and insertion of various media types.