Published on by Scott Woodrow
PROOF is a photocentric blog for National Geographic, implemented to highlight the best of their photographer’s work. It is set up so multiple photographers and National Geographic contributors can add photos and video, and share the stories as they relate to these visual components. Contributors can add content through their laptop, tablet, or even mobile device on-the-go, making this site a dynamic centerpiece of National Geographic’s photography. From the PROOF about page:
Proof is National Geographic’s new online photography experience. It was launched to engage ongoing conversations about photography, art, and journalism. In addition to featuring selections from the magazine and other publications, books, and galleries, this site will offer new avenues for our audience to get a behind-the-scenes look at the National Geographic storytelling process.
In addition to building the site to be visually centered around graphics and video, we also focused on a few other key requirements and features. It is easily navigable across multiple platforms and devices, and our developers worked to ensure visual elegance across the board. We built the site to be responsive with a very specific responsive layout grid in mind. For instance, images that are cleanly displayed in a 16:9 aspect ratio on desktop, will now automatically adjust to a 4:3 aspect ratio better optimized for mobile viewing.
National Geographic asked for a custom feature allowing users to automatically return to the homepage after scrolling through a page full of content (to continue reading additional stories in a unique way). Our development team devised a way to loop the scrolling so the homepage scrolls in once a user reaches the bottom of a page. Now, they can quickly access additional featured content without scrolling back to the top or manually reverting to the homepage.
Since the site allows for multiple contributors, we wanted to be able to present the full set of post contributors to viewers. By default there is only a single author for each story in WordPress. This is unfortunate when multiple contributors develop a single story – credit should be given where it is deserved. We extended WordPress to allow stories to feature more than one author if a story was the result of a collaborative or team effort.
Great websites are sustainable, and revenue often means advertising. We created a system for back-end users to control the ad placements and frequency, This allows the National Geographic editorial staff to make sure their ad choices provide a good overall experience for users the site.
We are very proud to support National Geographic in their launch of the PROOF site, please check it out.
