Mother Jones Magazine CMS & Search Implementation

Content Management Systems, Search Engine, Legacy Content Conversion

Quinn Interactive provided content management system (CMS) expertise to help Mother Jones’s designers convert a decade’s worth of archived content into a CMS-ready format, so that it could be easily managed. We also designed enduring site-wide CMS solutions to create a 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. The magazine begain its online presence, motherjones.com, ten years ago. In 2001, the website was logging 1.25 million page views per month.

The Challenge

While Mother Jones had redesigned the website several times over its ten-year existence, those new designs had never incorporated pre-existing content. Archived pages were just left with their old design. As a result, the site contained many different, designs, ruining the site’s cohesion. It was hard to make site-wide changes to content, as all material was static HTML with no CMS capability.

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, using Omniture Publish and SiteSearch. 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. Once converted, this data is easily uploaded via the 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.