custom Wordpress theme
To cater to the high traffic demands of this website we created a completely custom WP theme. All of the used page assets are minified and optimized and every below-the-fold piece of content is ajax-loaded.
Betches has become the voice of millennial females—a voice that asks, “Is vodka a carb”? Having experienced phenomenal growth, Betches needed a scalable platform with an adept team to maintain their online presence. With deep thinking and lots of “carbs,” we built a custom web solution and fresh new visual identity to help the brand reach new heights in 2018.
Betches is a New York media brand that speaks to a highly targeted upscale female millennial audience. They deliver humorous, edgy content daily.
On the back end of this site, we knew the editorial masterminds would need some robust tools to manage their content flow. Utilizing ACF, we were able to give their team the ability to edit and create articles, post their latest videos and update their podcasts. We also created a custom dashboard that shows each editor how their articles are performing.
We set up a new and more efficient web structure as well as a new site architecture, improving the navigation and allowing users to access related content more easily. These changes have driven an increase in user engagement and a decrease in the bounce rate. The article grid is now built for easy scanning and can accommodate more types of content—articles, photo galleries, videos, podcasts, and more. With marketing goals in mind, we incorporated banner ad capabilities that have boosted revenues.
We redesigned the full brand: Betches.com, Shop Betches, Betch Slapped, The SUP, and Betchelorette. By creating a color scheme for each of the content channels on betches.com—lifestyle, pop culture, video, etc.—we brought a bold and unique visual identity to the site that guides users through the categories and connects similar elements seamlessly. We also defined a bold typography combination that supports the overall brand impact.
To keep the site fun, we used multiple layouts and a different style for each type of content. All content is logically connected, making the site an effective introduction to the Betches world.
The feature videos are hosted by a 3rd party service (JW PLayer) and are an integral part of the content that appears on searches, Top Viewed list, etc. We simplified the design and adjusted the tone and layout for a better viewing experience. We also produced a solution for grouping serial videos by season to allow visitors to binge more easily.
“A week so crazy, Kanye wasn’t the craziest part”: who doesn’t want to listen to a podcast with that title? We segmented Betches’ four podcasts with clean and simple tabs that are synced up with iTunes for your listening pleasure. Go listen, thank us later.
chapter — 4
To cater to the high traffic demands of this website we created a completely custom WP theme. All of the used page assets are minified and optimized and every below-the-fold piece of content is ajax-loaded.
In order to make it future proof, we created a completely cloud-based WP installation that can be distributed on multiple servers with load-balancers if need arises. We are using external CDN for all website assets.
As with any news website, this one is very content heavy. To enable users to search through archived content, we used Elasticsearch as a component of our cloud install.