A Premium Website for a Trusted Brand
Our role
TheWrap is the leading, authoritative digital news organization covering the business of entertainment and media. The only independently owned Hollywood trade, it serves as a reliable and trusted source of breaking news, investigative reporting, expert analysis, and awards season coverage.
Challenges
When TheWrap approached Alley, their site was slow and struggled due to aging code. With a dated design and poor UX, it was time for an overhaul. Our goal was to bring the site up to the latest performance and security standards and to craft a look and feel that would match TheWrap’s status as a premium brand. We also needed to implement a new custom newsletter tool that would integrate with their new subscription service, Zephr. Perhaps the greatest challenge? We had just a 12-week window to complete this work.
Before
After
Solutions
To meet our tight timeline and deliver a vastly improved experience to TheWrap’s readers and editors, we hit the ground running with all hands on deck. Three themes captured our approach: agility, focus, and simplicity.
Agility
Out of the gate, we quickly gathered basic requirements for a custom newsletter tool while, at the same time, we locked down a style guide. This key deliverable provided a foundation upon which the site’s new look and feel would rest. We moved into the browser as quickly as possible and demoed early and often. This allowed TheWrap to see our progress, ask questions, and provide rapid feedback, which we would iterate on— sometimes in real-time, during demos. This helped them make decisions on the spot that we could then take back and implement.
Focus
At Alley, we always build and design features in order of business importance, and support our clients in rallying around clear priorities. For TheWrap, advertising revenue is a key part of their business so we first enabled and hooked up ad slots on the site. Next, as TheWrap is a news organization, we focused on the template most people will interact with on the site: the article. With each sprint, we continued to concentrate our work on features that brought the most business value to TheWrap.
Simplification
Knowing editors struggled under a poorly organized CMS, we simplified their editing experience by removing unused and extraneous blocks and reducing the number of templates in use. This effort paid dividends—identifying a core, required set of blocks meant we wouldn’t waste time fixing minor bugs related to unsupported blocks. Limiting templates and blocks also resulted in a more cohesive design.
Finally, using our own open-source SearchPress plugin, we replaced TheWrap’s search implementation with Elasticsearch to deliver faster, more relevant results. Going forward, Elasticsearch provides a strong foundation for continuous improvement.
Let’s talk about how we can put our talents to work for you.
