Security Systems News, Security Director News, HME News

Rescue

Getting Security Systems News was the first priority. The other two sites would be done later, leveraging UX and code work done for SSN.

The original site was in Drupal 6, but the previous developers were in over their heads. We had to start fresh, and migrate their content.

Three sites, one codebase

Since the three sites have the same overall architecture, we decided that the most sensible way to go would be to build this as a multisite install – one shared codebase with separate databases for each site. The vast majority of modules would be shared, while custom code for each site would live in their own sites subfolder. To the end user, the three sites would be completely separate, each on its own domain. To the site owners and maintainers, the sites would be centralized, with a central repository for performing code updates.

Architectural discovery and UX cleanup

We began with defining the sites' architecture, proposing ways to clean up problematic UI components.

The original design presented some usability challenges.

The middle of the original home pages presented a usability problem, with a Twitter block and fixed-height content areas presenting mouse-scroll traps for the user. We cleaned that up, and replaced the gray background of the main content area with a cleaner white presentation.

Migration

The SSN migration proved to be a bit of a challenge, because the previous developer's hacks held undocumented surprises for us. We needed to migrate content from the troubled site without migrating the trouble.

When the time came to migrate the other two sites, we encountered a couple dozen corrupted typographic characters due to incompatible character sets. We had to interpret what the characters were by context. Then we developed some scripts to convert those to valid utf-8 values.

Subscription integrations

Another major component of the project was to integrate the sites with their new fulfillment house. In the first phase we had to integrate SSN with their legacy subscriptions house because the priority was to get the site up and running and functional.

Then, a few months later, we re-engineered the integration to work with a different fulfillment house. In this process, we were able to improve the user experience somewhat: Rather than having to provide user info each and every time one wanted to download a whitepaper, the user's info is saved in a user account; the next time that user wants to download a whitepaper, she can simply log in.

Results

The three sites went live on a staggered timetable.

The new SSN site features a cleaner presentation with improved legibility and usability.

HME News, the trade publication for Home Medical Equipment, was built leveraging SSN's architecture, and powered by the same codebase.

Security Director News also share architecture and code with the other two sites.