Seeker.com Refresh
We recently refreshed Seeker’s website with the goals of unifying the tools and tech stack for each brand within Group Nine Media. Doing this allowed us to scale our product offering to more editorial teams and codify our ad packages for all of our brands. We wanted to take advantage of being under the hood to make small, yet impactful changes like updating our taxonomy and giving some love to the aesthetics of the site.
Let’s start with design
Our key design goals were to provide visitors with an at-a-glance understanding of the breadth of content that Seeker offers, we also wanted to engage users to explore content, and encourage advertisers to purchase campaigns. We applied Seeker’s new taxonomy to the designs so users can now navigate to our best content on the homepage, landing, and topics pages.
Our previous homepage design offered a feed of recently published content that allowed Editorial to be as passive or active with curation as they pleased. We still preserved lean back functionality like most recently published stories on the homepage and other landing pages so that our lean and busy editorial team can focus on telling stories. With the new layout, Seeker’s content is more organized and better reflected as as a science and VR brand.
Standardize Ad Packages
Leveraging the advertising opportunities that came with four major digital brands was critical to this refresh. We created a site that not only allows sales to tell a compelling story for Seeker, but its now scalable for both global and local ad packages.
Content Migration
The devil is in the details when it comes to migrating a CMS. We had over 40k pieces of content to migrate, organize, and translate into Seeker’s new CMS architecture, which is what Thrillist uses today. There were countless taxonomy mappings and rules applied to our content migration that support Seeker’s new editorial strategy. We ended up doing several imports to account for some snags that would result in a lot of stories being ill-categorized or missing elements like authors and images. Really, writing a few sentences about it doesn’t do justice to the vital work behind a CMS migration so we’ll save that deep dive for a later post. The end result is a very modular and flexible CMS that will support Seeker’s Editorial team and provide the building blocks for more templates in the near future.
What’s Next?
Our work is far from done in unifying the tech and tools that power the Group Nine Media brands. I’m excited to see two very distinct brands, Seeker and Thrillist, using the same toolbox to create their stories. We’ll be launching new and exciting updates soon, including more sites and other products within the Group Nine Media family so look for it!
