Case Study
The Drum is a global media platform that takes the leading position in providing marketing, advertising and media information and insights. As a number one marketing and media publisher in the UK and Europe, with a strong presence in the USA and Asia as well, The Drum reaches a wide audience of professionals and businesses looking to be on top of the latest trends in these industries.The Drum is also a major player in events and awards ceremonies. The company organizes and sponsors a range of industry events, as well as hosts a variety of industry awards that are globally oriented. The Drum’s mission is to help 1 million plus readers prepare for what’s next.
As The Drum is committed to providing a comprehensive and diverse
range of content, as well as ensuring a deep pool of news and information, their platform is
constantly growing. With The Drum’s continuous expansion, the size and complexity of its
website were getting bigger. As the website has been growing significantly, it started to
require a more systematic approach to development and maintenance. Multiple teams and
developers have been working on different parts of the website, therefore inconsistencies
and inefficiencies in the existing codebase emerged. Considering that, The Drum decided to
implement global standardization and optimization of its platform in order to improve
website performance and make future updates easier.
At the same time, The Drum has continued to take action toward further growth of their
platform by working on new TV and Podcast pages, which initially led to the collaboration
with Quadrix Soft. The Drum was looking for experts in the field of web development who will
be responsible for building TV and Podcast Pages using the newly introduced standards. After
we finished this 3-month project, our collaboration continued. The Drum included us in the
global standardization and optimization of its platform that it had started.
The services provided by our team were related to the following requirements:
Our team created .twig templates ensuring that the code is well-organized, easy to read and follows standards introduced with the global standardization of The Drum’s platform. This project involved work on the visual and interactive elements of the website where our team took all the necessary steps to bring the vision for TV and Podcast pages to life. This has resulted in web pages that are fully responsive on all devices, load quickly, perform well, are scalable and easy for future maintenance.
By working on the code optimization, our team reduced a large amount of existing code and removed the bottlenecks in the codebase. This has resulted in improved performance of the website, since now it loads faster, runs more smoothly and delivers a better user experience. By optimizing code, the memory consumption and hardware requirements are decreased, which will lower costs and improve efficiency. A very important aspect for a growing platform like The Drum, is that the optimized code is now more scalable and easier to maintain.
The Drum didn’t have a Content Management System and instead,
their website was retrieving data directly from the database. This whole process
threatened to become overwhelming with the significant website growth. Our team got
involved in building an interface for content editing which includes features for
post-editing, content review, publishing and category management. This has resulted in a
CMS interface that is tailored to the specific needs of The Drum and allows a large
number of content creators to manage website content much faster and easier. Content can
be reviewed and edited within the platform before being published. Considering the large
community of professionals that The Drum gathers, this is especially important for
maintaining content consistency within the site.
On the other hand, the component structure of an admin panel that our developer has set
will be critical for the scalability and maintainability of the system. The component
structure is set in a way to make it easier for developers to modify, add or replace
individual components in the future. This will reduce the time required for
accommodating the admin panel to further website growth.
Within the project of global standardization of The Drum’s platform, our team has worked on building an internal UI library. We have built components for generating buttons, media blocks and form factories. By keeping the users in mind, our team ensured that components are consistent, flexible and able to handle a wide range of scenarios. This will significantly decrease the time for creating buttons, media elements and forms in the future. The amount of custom code needed for each is also reduced as well as the possible bugs. On the other hand, consistency and user experience throughout The Drum’s platforms are improved. Users can navigate through the interface easier, thanks to the improved cohesion and predictability over the same elements in changed contexts.
Most of the tasks that were performed within this period form a good basis for future upgrades, which is very important bearing in mind the constant growth of The Drum. All components are designed according to the highest standards and considering the scalability of the platform. On the other hand, costs for future upgrades and maintenance will be decreased. The website performance is improved, content management is simplified plus consistency throughout content and interface elements is ensured. This makes all the users, content creators and the company as a whole benefit from the work that has been done.
