The Washington Times is a general interest daily newspaper headquartered in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1982, The Washington Times is one of the most frequently quoted newspapers in the U.S. It has gained a reputation for hard-hitting investigative reporting and thorough coverage of politics and policy.
Results
It has been one year since Optaros helped the The Washington Times with their website relaunch. Since that time, site traffic has increased more than 400 percent to their site, from just over 5 million page views per month in January 2008 to more than 20 million in June 2009, and the average time visitors spend on the site has increased 300 percent. In addition, WashingtonTimes.com has received numerous accolades from bloggers and press critics, including a Webby Honoree, editorsweblog.org, Robert Bluey and ZDNet.
The Client
The Washington Times is a general interest daily newspaper headquartered in Washington, D.C. Founded in 1982, The Washington Times is one of the most frequently quoted newspapers in the U.S. It has gained a reputation for hard-hitting investigative reporting and thorough coverage of politics and policy.
In direct response to readers seeking more control of how they consume their news, The Washington Times evolved from newspaper to full media company, offering news online 24 hours per day, seven days per week. News is no longer a one-way monologue where editors and reporters publish stories with no reader feedback. Rather, innovative news sites offer information and encourage readers to comment, helping to build a strong new democracy by informing and engaging constituents.
The Challenge
While The Washington Times is one of the top 25 largest newspapers in the United States, like many other traditional media outlets it had been seeing a steady decline in print circulation for several years, as more readers chose to read their news online. The Washington Times faced an additional challenge because of its aging site architecture, which hindered functionality, affecting online readership and visitor engagement levels.
The Washington Times executives knew that they needed a modern solution — an informative, interactive website with an easy-to-use content management system (CMS), in order to reach their goals of becoming a top ten news site in three years. By establishing a higher online readership base and better engaging that audience, The Washington Times could increase brand awareness and generate more advertising revenue.
The Solution
The Washington Times hired Optaros, providers of custom, online applications through Assembled Web, to develop and implement a website solution that would provide better usability and more functionality to The Washington Times staff, as well as encourage more interaction from online readers.
It was determined that several updates needed to be made in order to effectively engage readers and encourage them to become more active participants on the site. A more sophisticated CMS was developed to solve technical hurdles, such as the limitations writers and editors faced when publishing and featuring content. Lastly, an updated site architecture was integrated to help organize content and guide visitors to other articles of interest by linking stories based on theme.
In addition to assembling the solution, Optaros took the lead project management role in the reorganization and relaunch of WashingtonTimes.com. Using its OptAM (Optaros Assembly Methodology), Optaros handled coordination among website vendors, managing the timeline and ensuring quality throughout the site redevelopment process.
After the site launched on May 28, 2008, Optaros provided post-launch support to continue training The Washington Times personnel on site features and functionality.
Results
It has been one year since the site relaunch. Site traffic has increased more than 400 percent, from just over 5 million page views per month in January 2008 to more than 20 million in June 2009, and the average time visitors spend on the site has increased 300 percent. In addition, WashingtonTimes.com has received numerous accolades from bloggers and press critics, including a Webby Honoree, editorsweblog.org, Robert Bluey and ZDNet.
“The solution by Optaros makes our day-to-day operations exponentially more efficient,” said Christopher Wavrin, director of Internet Technology at The Washington Times.
“The new administrative functionality allows reporters and editors to easily upload site content and multimedia elements like audio, video and images, and to feature or modify site stories. Prior to the new site development, we had limited control of these attributes, and content manipulation was much more time-consuming.”
Featured and multimedia content, in tandem with site search functionality, helps visitors easily locate articles by importance, content type or theme, and popularity. Related links appear on article pages based on the themes or categories associated directly with the story, guiding visitors to other content of interest, based on what they read.
Regular readers interact with The Washington Times site by joining groups and creating profile pages, which include links to favorite news stories and blog articles, as well as an optional feed of their own blog posts and comments. In the marketplace, visitors can search for local businesses or register their own for a fee. Similarly on the events page, visitors can search and submit events. These community features have aided in the increase of online readership and time on site, thus encouraging greater potential advertising revenue.
Assembly
“Our goal with The Washington Times was to not only streamline operational activity, but to also increase viewer engagement,” said Steven Mocarski, project lead from Optaros. “We did this by creating content management controls for reporters and editors to easily create, organize and promote content in a way that guides the reader through the site. This allows, for example, reporters to author and upload articles to the site, and editors to choose sections of the site that each reporter can manipulate.”
Additional features, such as remote access to the open source CMS and controls, were added to streamline internal operations and allow The Washington Times staff to update content from off-site locations. Optaros implemented interactive features that the staff can easily create and customize, such as polls, live chats, private messages, user ratings, commenting and RSS feeds, enabling visitors to be more active participants on the site.
Content controls, using a taxonomy defined by the Associated Press, were integrated to offer easier organization of articles and multimedia content. Categories were added for specific site sections, acting as the basis for where an article will appear in primary navigation. These controls allow editors to feature a single piece of content in multiple areas of the site with only a few clicks of the mouse. Optaros also added CMS design features that enable editors to create special sections based on a given theme and identified by a custom URL — producing easy-to-find, search-friendly content.
“The site would never have launched without the help of Optaros,” said John Solomon, the executive editor at The Washington Times. “They brought the whole package, from technology to project management, and were able to deliver exceptional results within the expected time frame and budget constraints."
“The best proof of the success of the partnership has been the reaction of our readers. The number of people visiting the site has more than tripled, the number of page views has quadrupled and the time readers spend on the site interacting with the various new tools we’ve created has grown exponentially. There’s no better validation of Optaros’ work than that,” Solomon said.
The Washington Times solution was assembled by Optaros using a custom-built open source stack, including: Django open source CMS, PostgreSQL Database, Memcached Caching Systems and SoIR Searching.