Overview
Ask Media Group operates dozens of websites that help curious people find the information they need. Their growing portfolio of online experiences helps users discover everything from bathrobes to tax forms. They thrive on the challenge of developing a wide variety of sites that address everyday questions, no matter how large or small. Ask Media Group is owned and operated by IAC (NASDAQ: IAC).
Challenges
- Effectively migrated 11 websites, 50,000 Media + post articles within 12 weeks, including new features. The following websites were part of the migration:
- Each website required complex ads implementation
- Missing central content management console/dashboard
- Reverse engineering of many features/modules/business logic due to limited support from previous CMS developers
- The content structure was not compatible with standard gutenberg WordPress
- Complex editorial workflow & advertising management
- Advanced integration of Google analytics with multiple event tracking & search API
Solutions
- Preparing a special team of engineers and project managers to achieve a critical deadline. The client’s and our team were very active in feature review and solution designing during the first month
- We utilized the WordPress multisite + content syndication approach by the central site to each individual to provide the editor with one common dashboard to manage content for all sites
- Utilized WPCLI for bulk data migration by building custom scripts to convert data in WordPress compatible format.
- Developed many custom gutenberg blocks to provide an easy editing experience to editors
- To fulfill their complex advertising management needs, we developed a custom plugin to define ad rules across sites which is reusable across multiple sites
Results
- Migrated 11 websites within the concise timeline of 12 weeks, without any downtime
- Improved workflow for editors – they can now publish an article within two mins on WordPress
- Improved ad management module – complete flexibility to manage ad placement to tweak the revenue
- Improved analytics integrations
- Lots of flexibility with WordPress – with this implementation, AMG can take site-specific action, update the layout/design of each site, implement site-specific content strategy, etc.
- Easy to roll out new verticals/ sites
- Easy to implement any third-party integration
- Future proof implementation – optimized for a headless approach in the future
When the Multidots proposed that they could migrate 11 sites in 12 weeks, I was very skeptical and wasn’t really sure that it actually seems doable! But they did it. It’s a pleasure working with the whole team.
