OceanUp.com was the premiere site for the latest celebrity news stories on the net. Every story was geared toward teen celebrity obsessions, and each story was packed with crazy celebrity gossip! At the peak, the site was garnering almost 100,000,000 views a year, primarily in the late aged teen demographic.
Chris worked with OceanUp to migrate their site from Drupal to WordPress, cutting their hosting and management costs over 80%. almost 4,000 posts and content pieces were migrated, with 100% accuracy. He also implemented a fresh new, modern web design created by the world famous Jennifer Precious Finch! Chris and his team elevated the brand which later reached it’s pentacle of almost 10,000,000 monthly viewers.
In addition to a complete migration and full redesign of these celebrity news stories, Chris implemented many new frontend features like customized IG and Pinterest feeds, fancy animations on sponsored content, truly unique photo gallery presentation, and their legendary “Star Hunt” tool for finding those rare celebrity shots. He also provided 24 hour support and comprehensive security audits. With Chris’s performance and caching help, this site was able to handle all of their new traffic with minimal resources. Overall this was a fun, legendary project!
Highlights from Services Provided for Celebrity News Stories Site
Migration – Drupal to WordPress
- Comprehensive analysis of custom Drupal database setup
- Built action plan to guide the migration, with stakeholder buy-in
- Completely custom migration framework, with 100% accurate data migration of celebrity news stories and other content
- Daily syncing during project migration, without data duplication
- Fast delivery of migration results
- Validation tools built for apples-to-apples comparison of data
Development & Implementation
- Collaborated on a design with the world famous Jennifer Precious Finch
- Completely custom data migration from Drupal to WordPress
- Theme creation, setup, and admin tools
- Celebrity photo-gallery page logic
- Star Hunt tool and algorithm for finding celebrity shots
- Implemented uncommon, but effective, SEO markup to improve search rankings for celebrity news stories
- Integration of third-party tools and APIs
- Ad placement integration and management
- Caching scheme and UX improvements that lead to 50% reduction in user bounce rate
- many, many more features
Maintenance
- Weekly updates and improvements
- Iterative improvements on site speed
- 1-minute granularity backups and recoveries
- Hosting setup and management
- Third-party service replacements and improvements
Security
- Comprehensive WordPress security analysis & report
- Server & Services setup and routine auditing
- Password policy creation & enforcement
- Firewall level client blocking
- Round the clock security monitoring
- HTTPS setup and maintenance
Custom Themes & Plugins
- Completely custom, high-availability tuned theme
- Admin improvements for staff efficiency
- Caching & security plugins
- Admin tools to control celebrity gallery and star-hunt pages
- Site organization and optimization plugins
Hosting Setup
- Initial setup of hosting & ongoing account management
- Evaluation of hosting costs
- AWS management
- Integration of CDN