Business challenge
The New York Sun, a historic, authoritative daily broadsheet American newspaper that was founded in the 1800s and operated over 100 years as a prominent, Pulitzer Prize-winning daily newspaper, approached us for their digital transformation into the 21st century. The challenge is divided into two parts, the overall user experience (Performance, scalability, and SEO optimization) and visual design. Our design team proposed the route of architectural innovation which was ideal for what the core team of The New York Sun had in mind. The design had to accurately portray that this was not only a traditional, venerable brand with a rich heritage but also an entity that is innovative and modern.
Solution
The design team worked closely with The New York Sun’s core team to come up with the new design for their digital presence. Fast-forward all the brainstorming sessions and meetings that took into account the brand perception, technicalities, and the pace we had to move at. After 2 months we had something that everyone involved was proud of. The core experience focused on making it stupid simple for the users to find what they were looking for and consume content that was in line with their mental models but at the same differentiated the The New York Sun from it’s competitors. The New York Sun’s team also had some very specific demands when it came to the development of the website. WordPress, although a vintage CMS, was chosen to cater to the content management needs of the website due to team familiarity with that. The CMS is going to be coupled with a highly robust and highly available website front-end being developed in Next.js, a cutting-edge javascript framework.
The highlights of the system follow:
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Worked closely with the client’s core team in the design process to preserve the brand identity and value
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Coupled a vintage content management system with a highly robust and modern website front-end
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Highly scalable cloud infrastructure provisioned to handle high traffic volumes
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Leverage the AWS cloud to make the website highly available across 205 edge locations on six continents where the user are served the content from the nearest available edge location resulting in minimal latency
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Gained an elevation in performance by over 70% as compared to the existing system
