Hobbynews
Videogames news portal for Axel Springer, the makers of HobbyConsolas, Micromania, among other magazines. Leaders in Spain in their sector, they make the jump to the internet for the first time.
Axel Springer headquarters in Madrid Spain contacted me to build them a news portal, with a clear vision, and an in-house design which was a work in progress.
The portal includes
- Custom content types for news, reviews, previews, reports and videos, with their own design each.
- Custom user blogs for certain roles within their organization.
- A publication work-flow which allows them to publish articles in the future, and two roles for publishers, writers and bloggers.
- Ability to make content appear on their front-pages carousels, and control the order. This is also included in the future publication work-flow.
- A highly customized template, implementing the in-house design.
- Integration with kyte.tv video service
Development workflow
All development and early planning was done by me, working closely with the Axel Springer management team, which was headed brilliantly by Miguel Castillo.
The whole process lasted for 2 months and a half. During the first month, development was done locally, and iterations were uploaded to their servers regularly for reviews in frequent meetings. This allowed for early suggestions and misunderstandings in the portal to be fixed early on, minimizing the risk in the project.
After a month, the site structure and information architecture was stable, as well as the publishing work-flow. I was then able to let the publishing team start writing real content, getting used to the content entry work-flow, and from then on, we started working on the front-end mainly, and working with the designer to clear things out for implementation.
The whole process was done under version control for reliability and efficiency, getting as much configuration as reasonably possible in code for this reason, and for easier deployment.
