Express US website

Challenge

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Netro42 was tasked with delivering the first part of Reach’s US expansion strategy – the launch of a North American version of the highly successful Express website. 

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Solution

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Having designed and developed the UK version, our team already had an intimate knowledge of the Express website so we were ideally placed to tackle the task at hand, working closely with commercial and editorial departments to ensure the project would meet the requirements and objectives of all key stakeholders.

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One of the primary issues to overcome was the fact that the US edition would need to function across six time zones as opposed to just the one for the UK. This meant significant re-engineering of the back-end structure and CMS to accommodate the requirement to publish and display stories at different times for different audiences.

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The internal syndication of content between the UK and US editions required careful consideration and planning. The nuances of language variation between UK and US English and image licensing restrictions across different regions were two key issues for which we came up with elegant solutions in the CMS. A simple one-click solution clones a news item from the UK to the US CMS (and vice versa) with automated language translations and appropriately licensed images – ready for checking and editing by the editorial team – delivering significant time savings and vital ‘breaking news’ opportunities.

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Invisibly linking ‘cloned’ stories between the UK and US editions also avoided duplicate content issues which could harm SEO as Google is able to recognise them as language variants.

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Result

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KPIs for the Daily Express US website are confidential but we can confirm that six weeks after launch, they were absolutely obliterated! Our talented team continues to enhance and optimise website performance and develop additional features to keep pace with the demands of a news-hungry American audience.

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