Case Study for:
Associations / Organizations & Non-Profits, Construction & Engineering Companies, Professional Sales & Services Industry Today

 The Company

Industry today was established in 1998 as a print magazine and evolved into an online magazine and media platform focused on the manufacturing industry.

 The Challenge

Colophon New Media’s original work related to IndustryToday.com was to migrate the site to our hosting platform and provide maintenance to the website. The legacy site was very successful, with rich, engaging content and a large monthly readership. However, the backend content management tools were disorganized, the database was hard to maintain and the frontend of the website was aging, making it less responsive to user needs as devices rapidly evolved.

The challenges in redevelopment were to both improve the overall user experience and provide a robust, easy to use content management system for Industry Today staff.

 The Process

A complete redesign process was undertaken, where Colophon first discussed the primary objectives of Industry Today and the needs of their readers. Wireframes were produced, new design images were drawn and ultimately a new custom WordPress theme was developed.

While the front end was being developed a suite of backend tools were custom built to handle the administrative needs of Industry Today.

The large size of the database and sheer volume of pages that were included with the website and had been indexed by Google required Colophon to build a migration plan and scripting that would preserve all data and improve the overall efficiency of the website database.

 The Solution

A winning design was created to provide a successful end-user experience, and a suite of backend content management tools were created to improve the efficiency of Industry Today’s website administrators.

Using a combination of automated procedures and manual data entry thousands of records were migrated to the new website.

The Industry Today platform includes advertisement and sponsored content. Colophon programmed advanced tracking and reporting for ads and posts that allow Industry Today to provide data to their customers on the success of the ads.

Special attention was paid to preserving the hard earned Google PageRank that IndustryToday.com had accumulated over the years, while also enhancing the search visibility of the new website pages.