Case Study

MotherJones Magazine

Content Management Systems, Search Engine, Legacy Content Conversion

Quinn Interactive provided content management system (CMS) expertise. The goal was to help Mother Jones website designers convert a decade's worth of archived content into a CMS-ready format, where it could be easily managed. We also designed enduring site-wide CMS solutions to create a much more flexible, scalable and easily administered website.

The Client

Mother Jones Magazine was founded in 1976 as a monthly publication dedicated to providing socially conscious reporting. They present news and feature stories on politics, lifestyle, culture and the arts, on both a national and global basis. The magazine initiated an online presence, www.motherjones.com, ten years ago. In 2001, the magazine reported that their website was logging 1.25 million page views per month.

The Challenge

While Mother Jones' website had undergone many redesigns over its ten-year existence, those new designs had never incorporated pre-existing content. Archived pages were simply left in their original form whenever new designs were adopted. As a result, the site contained many different, completely unrelated, designs. In addition, it was extremely difficult to make universal changes to content, as all material existed in purely static html format only, completely devoid of content management capabilities.

The Solutions

The Quinn Interactive team collaborated with Mother Jones engineers and web designers to create a full-service content management system for the site, employing the leading CMS software, Atomz Publish and Search. We developed custom page scraping and data gathering tools to help convert large stores of information from legacy designs and static web pages into XML formatting. Once converted, this data is easily uploaded via the site's advanced new CMS system, to appear as online articles. To display this content, we built a series of specialized templates for stories, special sections, photo essays and more.

Results

MotherJones.com now has a fully consistent look and feel to a website containing over 5,000 articles and a large number of photographs. The site is an easily accessible and extremely valuable resource for more than two decades of groundbreaking journalism covering a wide range of vital topics. In addition, the site is now simpler, more efficient and much more affordable to manage and maintain. Site-wide changes can now be made in a manner of minutes.