WXXI
A multi-site solution that caters to its community, becoming the go-to source for information, media, and news.
Client Overview
For 60+ years WXXI has served the greater Rochester, NY community with an educational public media resource that engages, inspires and strengthens its community. WXXI is a partner with PBS and NPR, and features award-winning children’s shows, public affairs, science and nature as well as being one of the most active local program producers in New York State.
WXXI Mobile Gallery
The challenge
WXXI’s site was very outdated on an older content management system that hadn’t been regularly supported in several years. This meant that the site broke easily and often, was not mobile friendly, wasn’t accessible, and was difficult to update. Users were frustrated and got lost due to a lack of clear direction and storytelling.
WXXI was long overdue to migrate their incredible amount of content into a new multi-site that would pull all their domains into a single platform.
The identified goals were:
- To design a new suite of websites for WXXI with a clean, minimal aesthetic;
- To make them responsive;
- To build the site in a way that was easier to maintain for both back-end management and content entry;
- To slowly integrate all their domains into a new WordPress site;
- To become the main source for up-to-date information and experiences within their local community.
The process
Deep Discovery Work
Research into competitors, analytics, user behaviors, content, and more focused the team’s efforts into how to best move forward into the next phases in order to meet the stated goals.
High Fidelity Prototypes
A flexible system of designs were created in order to accommodate a variety of content including video, audio, ads, articles, and more.
The solution
The client team needed to move to a modern open source CMS. Additionally the team planned to maintain the new website through their internal development team after launch. As a result, WordPress was chosen for its accessible administrative interface, and its wide support from the international open source community.
WXXI sought to combine all of their disparate sites into a single CMS. With WordPress’ multisite functionality, Kanopi was able to create the infrastructure for WXXI to combine all of their sites into a single platform.
One significant challenge pertained to migrating content from the existing platform; since the client team lacked the budget to migrate their content programmatically, they needed to manually port the content to the new system. Thus, once the build portion of the project was completed, Kanopi was on hold until WXXI manually loaded their own content (thereby eliminating migration costs). This created a longer timeline, but working within the new streamlined WordPress backend simplified the overall effort.
The result
The project resulted in a user-focused website that caters to visitors trying to find information, becoming a hub for the community, and the go-to source for information and news regardless of what device they are using.
The client team was able to transition from their unstable and outdated platform to a new sustainable WordPress site that leverages the best of Gutenberg and the Genesis theme. Additionally, they combined their many disparate domains — each on a different platform — into a single site. This reduced the overall effort needed to maintain and update their many digital properties.
WXXI continues our relationship and the work in our long-term support program.
