Wired.com's HowTo Wiki

The Client

Wired.com, the online companion to Wired Magazine, is one of CondéNet’s lifestyle web sites bringing the editorial excellence of CondéNast magazines to digital media. Wired Magazine, founded in 1993 and published in San Francisco, reports on the impact of technologies on culture, the economy, and politics.

The Challenge

Wired.com had a mission-critical deadline for migrating their Wired How-To Wiki to MediaWiki, the same open-source system used by Wikipedia. To meet their deadline, they needed to outsource the front-end programming portion of the project because their internal resources were overloaded. The work required a pixel-perfect implementation of Wired’s designs into a set of MediaWiki templates or “skin.” As well, advertising, analytics, and several MediaWiki extensions had to be integrated into the standard MediaWiki software.

The Solution

Quinn Interactive integrated the custom visual design and layout into out-of-the-box MediaWiki functionality, along with extensions to meet essential editorial and business requirements. Custom designs were applied to the wiki navigation, user navigation, wiki page navigation and page content. Advertising tags were added to all pages for wiki-wide visibility. Google Analytics and HBX Analytics were integrated to create wiki-wide, use-related marketing statistics.

Results

Because of QI’s fast, efficient technical implementation, Wired.com’s team was freed to focus on other aspects of the MediaWiki implementation, including hosting and member authentication. Despite the complexity of the project and an aggressive timeline, they beat their launch expectations with a substantial savings of time and resources.