ThessNews
The e-newspaper of Northern Greece
Services
- Consulting
- UI / UX Design
- Custom Development
- SEO
Year of Implementation
ThessNews, a member of RThess Media Group, the largest news group in Northern Greece, is dynamically moving forward, entering the digital world!
3ds' goal was to lead ThessNews into the new digital age, while retaining its distinctive features: valid information, absolute reliability, and instant access to information.
Adopting best practices in SEO, Development and UX/UI Design, we created a site that is easy to use and readable, both by users and search engines, thus bringing it to the top of Google’s search results page!
The challenge
How do you transfer almost 200,000 articles from one site to another and how do you fit them into the relevant categories – which you just created?
This was the main challenge we faced when creating the brand new ThessNews, and we did it successfully.
The questions we had to answer to reach the desired result? Many!
What are the users looking for today? What do they want to learn? How will they be informed about the news and what is happening in their city, Greece and the world? Does design play a role in a reader's trust in a news site? What are the requirements for such a site to appear on Google News and thus increase its audience? How do you become the leading media in Thessaloniki and the whole of Northern Greece?
We wondered, researched, and tested during the creation of ThessNews, and we are proud of the result!
Let's see it…
ThessMethodology
The strategy we developed for ThessNews included redesigning its corporate identity and architecture in order to increase its credibility and, consequently, its audience.
The plethora of pre-existing articles and how they would fit into the newly added categories was not a simple task.
At the same time, we had to create a site with fast loading speed, especially on mobile devices, while great importance had to be given to the meta tags that we would generate, in order to make the site as search-engine friendly as possible.
ThessResult
After extensive testing, we ended up creating a functional and easy-to-use site, which fully covers the needs and particularities of the modern reader who wants to be informed in real time about what is happening around them.
ThessNews has been transformed into a modern news site, which aims at the best possible user/reader experience. The best practices for creating articles have been applied, with full optimization for mobile devices, enhanced organic visits through SEO actions and faster loading speed always according to Google standards.
The collaboration of the Development, Design and SEO departments contributed to the completion of a site, which is now among the top in its category.
ThessDesign
Achieving a well-structured and, at the same time, functional site is not an easy task - especially when the amount of information added daily is immense.
In terms of design, we implemented a strategy that meets all the specifications for a complete responsive experience, both on desktop and mobile devices.
As already mentioned, the existing ThessNews articles were close to 200,000, and the way we would create the categories to make them easy to use and functional was paramount - a bet we had to win!
Based on the latest UX (User Experience) and UI (User Interface) trends, we have managed to deliver a complete site, where the visitor can browse and be informed about current affairs, politics, social issues, sport etc.
ThessSEO
The SEO department proceeded with optimization actions, both in terms of architecture and content. The SEO and Design departments collaborated perfectly, aiming for the best possible user experience, which will lead improved metrics and, consequently, to more visits. After extensive competitor’s analysis and research over the most important categories and keywords, we were able to define the SEO-friendly architecture of the site.
With successful categorization in terms of architecture, and detailed writing of appropriate meta tags in terms of content, we built a news site that competes with the largest publishers in Greece.
ThessDevelopment
The main issue that we had to solve in this project was the redirection from the old site to the new one, without "losing" positions in organic ranking. With fast and methodical moves, we managed to keep the site high in organic results, while we also defined the optimal methodology for the new articles to be uploaded "correctly" from now on.
The SEO and Development teams collaborated in the construction of this website in order to initially create a dynamic and attractive website with modern aesthetics and high performance, but also to achieve a smooth transition to the new era of ThessNews.
It is also worth mentioning that custom development with research, understanding and implementation of Google instructions, led ThessNews to Google News, making it visible to a plethora of new readers!
Finally, we should mention Core Web Vitals, the latest Google update, which we took seriously under consideration in order to deliver an easy-to-use site, which meets all the requirements for an exemplary user experience!
