The client
Meredith Corporation is the largest magazine publisher in the United States. Best known for titles like People, Better Homes and Gardens, and Martha Stewart Living, Meredith expanded their impressive portfolio by acquiring Time Inc. in 2018. Long before becoming a media empire, Meredith launched in 1902 with Successful Farming magazine.
The problem
Meredith needed to (1) realign their Successful Farming and Agriculture.com brands and (2) create a modern digital experience. The separate brands confused their audience, and their out-of-date, proprietary content management system was a pain to use. They needed a partner who could make strong recommendations and provide solutions that would last into the future.
Meredith Agrimedia
We needed a long-term partner to continuously drive development forward. Four Kitchens had a proven track record and demonstrated their ability to find innovative solutions from day one.
—Courtney Yuskis, Digital Engagement Director
The solution
For this project, we worked as a thought leader with Meredith, guiding them towards a brand refresh with an emphasis on surfacing evergreen content from their archives, growing audience engagement, and developing a new way to think about advertising.
Combining their brands through a unified visual design
We helped Meredith Agrimedia combine the visual style of Successful Farming magazine with the utility of Agriculture.com. The result is a digital publishing platform that complements, rather than competes with, the print magazine
Metrics that matter
By focusing on great user experience, we drastically reduced page load times and increased ad performance. Their new platform has sped up content production and positively impacted their bottom line. Meredith Agrimedia can now grow their qualified audience, providing advertisers certainty that the ads they’re selling are being seen by the right people.
Migration of deep archives
We oversaw the migration of their massive digital archive to Drupal — more than 60,000 pieces of content and 25GB of assets, including articles, slideshows, videos, and podcasts. Hundreds of content categories were distilled into a logical information architecture based on audience and stakeholder interviews. Evergreen content was resurfaced and promoted through content‐agnostic modeling, providing multiple kinds of content in the same visitor stream for increased user engagement.
The results
- Sitewide viewability (advertising performance) increased from 43% to 92%
- Page load times decreased by 67%
- Exposure to sub-brands increased by 44%
- On-site searches increased by 10,426% (not a typo!)
- Successful on-site searches went from 14 to 12,000 — only 45 days after launch
Meredith Agrimedia
We are thrilled with the noticeable improvement in baseline analytics and Four Kitchens’ ability to adapt to our hosting environment and IT policies. There will continue to be hurdles to overcome but the Four Kitchens team members always come to the table with a positive outlook and proposed solution.
—Courtney Yuskis, Digital Engagement Director
The details
Our work with Meredith Agrimedia is an example of a large Drupal migration that involved a deep dive into user experience, information architecture, and content modeling.
Services provided
- Thought leadership on branding and site structure
- Content audit and content modelling
- Site migration from a proprietary CMS to an inner-sourced Drupal platform
- Visual design guided by their print publication
- Collaborated with internal IT team to develop a Drupal-optimized hosting environment
Technologies used
- Drupal 7
- Behat
- CircleCI
- Aquifer
- Jenkins
- Gulp
- PHP_CodeSniffer / Coder
- ESLint