Dezeen, the world’s most popular and influential architecture and design magazine, asked us to build and manage all development on the site including server infrastructure. Since then, we have been commissioned to build the platforms for Dezeen Jobs and Dezeen Awards. We enjoy an ongoing relationship involving core maintenance and development of new functionality.
Due to the critical nature and high volume audience, ensuring smooth running of the platform is imperative. Through an ongoing maintenance retainer agreement, we perform monthly maintenance tasks and feature enhancements to optimise and continually future-proof the site to ensure excellent performance and stability as the site evolves.
Highlights
- 11m page views per month
- 30k+ articles
- Mission-critical site with a global audience
Development of Dezeen Jobs
We worked with Dezeen to re-build their jobs board to service their strong following of architects, design companies and professionals. We migrated their existing platform to a WordPress website for it’s content management ease and leveraged the e-commerce functionality available via WooCommerce to enable job adverts to be purchased by employers. Since launching in 2016, Dezeen Jobs has many dynamic new features and continues to deliver strong results.
Building a bespoke judging tool
Dezeen wanted to launch an annual Awards programme where architecture, design studios could submit their projects for industry-leading professionals to judge. Den were tasked with building the full journey from entry submission through to the judging stages. Entry submissions are stored in a custom-built Laravel platform which judges can log in to to review entries and cast their votes via a bespoke built voting service. Awards admins are also able to log in to the platform and track the status of each entry.
Optimisation
Dezeen is committed to ensuring the site leads the way to reduce its carbon footprint, improving the site’s efficiency by streamlining how data is delivered. Working with EcoPing, we analyse, benchmark, and prioritise the improvements and efficiencies that can be made.
Due to our optimisation of the site, 1058 tonnes of CO2 will be saved per year, the equivalent of 1,557 flights from Amsterdam to New York.
The outcome
Not only has the optimisation work dramatically reduced the carbon footprint of Dezeen, but it’s also substantially improved the site’s user experience.
An improvement of just 0.1s in page load time has been shown to generate benefits for conversions, bounce rate, lead generation and site referrals as users are able to browse more freely between pages without distraction or delay.
To date, this project has reduced Dezeen’s average page load by 58.3% (~4s), and we’re only just getting started. We continue to work with Dezeen to ensure the site is continually optimised and sustainable development practices are implemented.