Large Scale Social Publishing Platform with Drupal
NovaFM.com.au is one of Australia’s most visited websites with around 4 million page views per month, and chose Drupal as their content management platform to drive user engagement.
Challenge
The internal team behind the NovaFM redesign project, originally from MySpace Australia, determined that Nova weren’t using their website as an effective audience engagement platform. The challenge was to drive the users from what was happening on air to the website instead of losing them to external social networks. The new website also needed full mobile compatibility for smartphones and tablets and required a huge content migration effort of more than 400,000 articles stored in a legacy content database.
Solution
NovaFM chose Drupal as their content management platform and PreviousNext to develop their new rich media, mobile, faceted search powered site. PreviousNext successfully developed the strategy, design and deployment of the project and partnered with Bulletproof Hosting on the large technical infrastructure required for the new website.
Outcome
The new site launched on schedule in early 2012, and instantly saw huge increases in visitor traffic and engagement. This included a 30% increase in page views and visit duration from 3 months earlier, and a doubling in visits by mobile users, largely due to the site’s new mobile responsive design. These statistics mean NovaFM is arguably Australia’s largest and most visited Drupal website.
Where the old system was very manual for content editors, the new Drupal content management platform provides high levels of automated content aggregation. This was largely facilitated by using the Apache Solr search engine in conjunction with Drupal, also allowing new ways to navigate content via a faceted search interface.
The NovaFM website was also developed in a way that allows it to be quickly reskinned and redeployed for other DMG Radio stations, with http://www.smoothfm.com.au launching in mid May 2012 based on the same platform.