Purton Magazine

We enjoy working with organisations of all sizes, from established businesses and enterprising startups to charities and local groups. We like the diversity of digital challenge each organisation faces and love seeing how our tailored solutions address those issues and allow an organisation to move forward.

We were recently asked to help develop a digital presence for the committee of a village magazine – normally distributed locally via printed copies with PDF editions hosted in a simple DropBox account.

Not only did they want to make it easy for residents to find and browse historic editions of the magazine, the magazine committee also wanted to create a searchable advertisers directory. This would extend the reach of the advertising normally only placed in the printed magazine, distributed to local residents.

We worked on an initial wireframe with the committee, working out which pages needed to go where and what copy would need to be written.

A simple, clean design was developed and applied in the build phase.

We then added a number of bespoke UX additions to the WordPress back end, to make it easier for the committee to manage. These included:

• Using the publish date of a custom post type to create an archive of magazines, automatically grouping them by year. The archive updates itself over time, ensuring that the current year’s set is at the top of the page and historic editions can always be easily found.
• Using hidden meta tagging in a keyword search for advertisers so that visitors could search using keywords such as ‘windows, window, glazing, glass, replacement, cracked’ etc to find a local window repair and replacement company whose printed advertisement may not (and probably didn’t) contain those keywords.

If you live locally to Purton and are looking for a local trades company or service provider, do have a look at the advertisers directory on the new website.