Migrating some of the largest health and wellness brands including Men’s Health, Women’s Health, Runner’s World, Bicycling, and Prevention onto a single common Drupal platform.

The Unified Content Management Platform (UCMP) is the result of the consolidation and migration of nearly one-hundred individual websites, blogs, and un-managed documents across multiple technologies into a common drupal solution.  UCMP standardized site design, technology architecture, content types, publishing workflow, and external content distribution for all Rodale websites and digital products.  

• The architecture of the solution was a multi-site design allowing a single development code-base to drive multiple brand websites.

• Brands utilized consistent design layouts.  Styling for the brands comes from single parent theme that is applied to all brands.  Major layout changes can be applied to all brands at one time while still allowing unique brand identity,

• Included a connection to offline content management system, so that content is shared between offline (print magazine) sources and original online content.

Business Drivers:

Increase User Engagement through re-designed responsive template used across all sites.  Allow users to view site across multiple devices, favor content in their private profile, and speed up page load time.

Increase Ad Revenue through better ad-viewability and placement to increase revenue of sites.

Increase Search Engine Visibility through better tagging and following of SEO guidelines.

Reduce Support Costs due to resource drain of people, money, and time on neverending migrations of unrelated sites as well as redeveloping the same or very similar enhancements repeatedly on different technologies.  Build once, deploy to all.

Reduce Security and Stability Risks by reducing technology footprint and spreading technical resources across variety of solutions.  Centralize the management of 3rd party tags placed on the site.  

Increase Content Distribution efficiency by linking content across entire solution and having central gateway for external data feeds.

Attendees will hear overall struggles that lead to the project, technology challenges and decisions made throughout the development process, and the performance results since the project was completed.