Revitalized CMS for D.C.’s favorite news station.
WTOP
As the top news radio station in the Washington, D.C. region, WTOP is known for delivering the latest in quality local and national news to hundreds of thousands of listeners on a daily basis.
WDG helped WTOP manage and increase site traffic while seamlessly migrating an extensive volume of content for their new site.
Challenge
Design a powerful CMS to support a broad spectrum of multimedia content for an enhanced online presence and manage site traffic.
Solution
Implement a suite of custom WordPress features to allow for easier administration of content and improved functionality with responsive advertising capabilities.
Result
Increased mobile traffic, SEO, site sessions, and email referrals. Improvements have allowed WTOP to continue to grow their audience.
Increase in email referrals
Increase in mobile traffic
Increase in sessions
Challenge
Creating Home Page Flexibility.
With high site traffic, WTOP needed a cohesive means of creating, curating, and publishing content from a variety of sources simultaneously. WDG helped streamline this process with a customized homepage that could be easily managed by WTOP’s team remotely from separate locations. Using Advanced Custom Fields, WTOP admins can prepare, stage, and publish individual sections separately, allowing them the ability to produce content quickly and efficiently.
Solution
Migrating a Robust Content Library
WDG’s development team established a methodology for migrating over 100,000 articles in WTOP’s content repository. To accommodate the large body of content, we used Foundation 3 for the CSS framework. Our team built and implemented a custom migration process from WTOP’s MYSQL database to a WordPress MYSQL format. We employed WordPress Command Line Interface, WP-CLI, to speed up the migration process timelines. This allowed our team to run as many supplemental migrations as needed without harming any data from the previous migration.
Rich Media Gallery
Visual Content
WTOP had a large range of media items to integrate into the new site. WDG developers built out flexible, media-rich galleries to successfully mediate many different types of available visual content. WTOP editors are able to manipulate the content as needed with the capability to upload images, videos, and embed social media content into the galleries. Given WTOP’s status as the top area news provider, we developed robust ways of integrating on-air audio into articles for online content.
UI/UX
Accounting for Responsive Advertising
WDG’s team helped create an engaging user experience through a responsive website for both viewers and advertisers. The improved responsive design allows WTOP advertisers to target different audiences according to screen size in order to sell ads with individual optimization. To accomplish this, we built a custom plugin that provided integrations with Google’s DoubleClick for Publishers. This gave WTOP the flexibility to choose how particular slots were implemented within selected locations. On top of this flexibility, we provided pre-defined and free-form key value pairs directly from WordPress, allowing ad managers the ability to target ads based on a large number of criteria. WDG implemented custom ad slot types, including interstitial ads, automatic ad slot creation, and time-sensitive ad slots.
Increase in email referrals
Increase in mobile traffic
Increase in sessions
Result
Measured Success
Since the launch of the new website, WTOP has reported a 49% increase in mobile traffic. Overall, this created a 20% increase in sessions on the new site. A 725% increase in email referrals has represented over 100,000 recipients. Search traffic has picked up dramatically, including syndication on Google News. WTOP continues to grow as the area’s premier news outlet because of their powerful WordPress capabilities and increased advertising revenue for targeted audiences.