The Situation

Oildom Publishing Co. of Texas, Inc. is a family-owned business that has continuously published high-quality and market relevant titles serving the energy, construction and rehabilitation markets. Today, they are comprised of two award-winning circulation-audited monthly magazines, a vibrant monthly news circular and two industry-leading conferences.

Oildom was in the process of migrating their existing sites from Drupal 6 (as it was no longer supported) to WordPress. After being underwhelmed by a previous migration project, Oildom came to Cheeky Monkey needing expert advice, communications and development skills for the Pipeline & Gas Journal migration. Their existing site was non responsive, employed poor navigation and site infrastructures, and had become a chore for administrators. They also needed the Monkeys to implement an already completed new design (responsive), and re-arrange the navigation and site architecture based on our best practices experience.

The Solution

Discovery

The key to this project’s success was in the communication and knowledgeable advice. The Monkeys and Oildom teams spent quality time on ensuring we established the priorities for the site architecture while assisting with some mobile design restructuring as we had discovered the new design was not initially responsive. We set up weekly meetings to keep everyone on track and utilized Skype chat for quick questions and clarity of daily expectations.

Development

The website was to have a variety of features that engaged users and settled administrator frustrations. These features included:

  • a mega-menu for each main menu
  • a special reports section
  • programmatic issue and current issue landing page
  • an events listings
  • responsive ad slots & DoubleClick set up
  • a recent news area and an intuitive backend interface for easier adding and editing of content.

Our solution was to create a multi site setup that had reusable functionality that would allow Oildom to expand the site to house more journals and articles. Our production team developed this using generalizations to the base functions that allowed for future multi site installs. This meant that Oildom could use the same WordPress installs and Plugins, if and when, they wanted to expand their other magazine properties.

Developing a few of these features took some 3rd party plug-in help. The Production Monkeys used Zurb Foundation (a responsive framework) which allowed for easy design and setup of the site responsiveness. This installation made the mobile site easy to customize, while being flexible with varying browsers and readable on any device. This product was budget friendly and allowed the production team to spend their time effectively and efficiently.

Additional tools, programs and technologies used:

  • DoubleClick for Publishers to set up responsive site ads
  • Google Analytics to measure key site metrics
  • JQuery, PHP and MySQL for backend functionality and ease of use

Wow’s

The Oildom team was very appreciative of the Monkey’s thoroughness and advice throughout the project. Again, communication was key to helping the client feel secure and informed during the migration and design implementation which had been lacking for them before.