Al Araby TV - Digitization of News and Media Experience

Goals and Requirements:

1. Launch comprehensive news and media website within a tight timeframe of 15 weeks.
2. Robust CMS performance tailored to support digital news and media experiences.
3. Optimize the digital news content publishing and promotion for Al Araby TV.

Challenges Faced By Client:

1. Their legacy website lacked the ideal content structure to support a full-fledged digital news experience.
2. Lack of seamless content publishing, management, and moderation process in their legacy CMS.
3. Lack of flexibility needed by content publishers to create dynamic content and personalized landing pages.
4. Tight schedule to launch the new website to market.
5. The client needed reliable support and maintenance for their website.

What We Delivered:

After the project requirement discovery stage was completed, Vardot proceeded to audit designs provided by Al Araby TV and commenced on delivering an enterprise-grade Drupal 8 responsive digital news experience within the agreed-upon timeframe.

The key highlights of the project were:

Uber Publisher - Digital News and Media CMS

Vardot's Uber Publisher is a Drupal 9 CMS packed with hundreds of features and modules tailored to digital news and media experiences. 

Uber Publisher is an API-first platform that prioritizes content creation, sharing, and distribution and utilizes a flexible content architecture, open APIs, and other integration capabilities to enable builders to expose content and applications to wider audiences, across channels, devices, and other applications.

Uber Publisher enabled Al Araby TV to enjoy the following key benefits:

1. Launch faster to market - saving hundreds of project development hours.
2. World-class enterprise security standards.
3. Ideal content structure for news and media digital platforms.
4. Accessibility best practices.
5. Superior content publishing and moderation workflows.
6. On-site SEO features and tools for their content publishing team.
7. Multilingual CMS backend for their diverse team.
8. Responsive and consistent experience across all devices and screen sizes.

Streamlined Content Moderation Workflow

Uber Publisher provided the Al Araby TV content team with a powerful workflow and permission system that allows them to control what, who and how content is published on their site based on pre-defined user roles and permissions.

This workflow is a strategic asset for digital news and media platforms that need to get ahead of the news cycle in a bid to break news promptly - saving them a ton of effort and time.

A streamlined publisher-centric user experience for all team members (technical and non-technical) that are involved in content creation, curation, management, moderation, publishing, and promotion.

• Robust media library that enables the user to search, find and repurpose content easily. Saving time.
• User-friendly rich content editor and backend features making it easier for non-technical.
• On-site SEO features and tools enabling Al Araby TV to optimize the performance of their webpages and content across all search engines.

Architecture and Content Structure

Their legacy website lacked the ideal content structure of a modern digital platform that provides news and media to their audience. Uber Publisher already assists news and media site builders with the needed content structure.

Our UI/UX driven development ensured that all custom content categorization is accounted for in the final delivery to ensure that all content published on the website is on par with the best practices of Google and other search engines that may be used by their audiences.

The flexible content architecture allows for custom pages, layouts, and integrations for special use cases - in Al Araby TV's case would be Brightcove for video content streaming.

This allowed Al Araby TV to also maximize its potential for online ad revenue thanks to the flexibility provided to them when it comes to ad placement across their webpages.

Reliable Enterprise Support and Maintenance

We pride ourselves on proactively demonstrating reliable support, expertise, and results throughout the entire project delivery process - and this project was no different.

Our DevOps team provides Al Araby TV with 24/7 website performance monitoring, reliable hosting, resolving issues, averting potential risks, and continuous delivery of upgrades and updates when necessary. Ongoing support includes:

• Ensure ongoing compliance with accessibility, security, and performance best standards
• News platform updates
• Integrations
• Data migration
• Immediate availability for critical support tickets
• Daily backups
• 24/7 security monitoring and upgrades
• Risk management
• Hosting on Platform.sh
• Business operations support
• Enterprise SLA based availability for support

Digital Support - SEO

As part of our digital delivery support, we also provide Al Araby TV with digital marketing consultation regarding boosting SEO performance.

Vardot assists with foundational SEO and recommends SEO strategies. Learn more about how Core Web Vitals will be essential to how Google will determine your ranking in 2021.

Vardot works with on-site optimizations according to and beyond Alaraby TV SEO standards for search engines, such as the use of clean, web-standard markup, correct image, and heading tags, site map generation, and submit the site to search engines to assist in being found organically by search engines.