Prolific North is an independently-owned publishing and events company. Based in Manchester, they have developed into the leading news and events service for media, marketing and creative sectors in the North of England. They host a range of awards, including their own Prolific North Awards which, consistently attracting upwards of 800 guests, is the most popular awards night of its kind outside of London.

Launched in 2013, Prolific North began their operations on the Wordpress platform. As their brand authority developed, they outgrew their original website as it was back-end CMS focused. Hosting over 12,000 content items and a variety of user data, the development of a Drupal website required a sizeable migration from Wordpress.

Prolific North wanted something more modern, providing manageable flexibility and allowing them to present their content in a more engaging way. As with the delivery of any new site, SEO insight was also required, to ensure a premium user experience and to maintain the client’s existing rankings.

In line with Google’s new mobile-first ethos and the introduction of Google Accelerated Mobile Pages (AMP) to boost relevant news results, we utilised accelerated mobile pages for the Prolific North site. Users can now reach streamlined, lean versions of each article quickly and easily, without ever leaving the search engine

In order to enable user-generated content to be hosted via Prolific North, we integrated an ecommerce element into this Drupal site. Companies, agencies and recruiters are now able to register for a free account, which allows them to pay to publish job vacancies onto the site, in order to reach a wider audience. In this novel approach, ecommerce meets traditional classified ads.

Through the ‘Prolific Profiles’ directory, agencies also pay to have a company profile featured on Prolific North. This can include links to relevant articles and announcements, accreditations and testimonials, slideshow portfolios, social links and much more. An additional ‘Freelancer Directory’ will host further users, once they have signed up and paid their subscription fee through the integrated service.

The Jobs section offers companies the opportunity to pay for a 30-day listing on the popular jobs board, alongside coverage on Twitter and the Prolific North newsletter. Meanwhile, it also allows the site’s large user-base to search for a variety of available vacancies in their area of expertise.

The updated Jobs page presents a variety of filtering options, allowing job-hunters to refine results by Category, Salary, Location or Contract Type. A search function provides faceted search for the array of Job adverts, utilising Apache Solr. This functionality allows a vast quantity of content to be presented reasonably and to be reachable by the right audiences.

Providing an end-to-end service, the Prolific North website now offers the option to integrate an application form into a job advert, so that readers can submit their CVs and apply for jobs directly on the site.

Boasting 26,000+ email subscribers, and encouraging visitors to the site to sign up to the newsletter in the footer of every page, it is vital that the Prolific North staff are able to cater for demand and produce a daily newsletter with ease.

To streamline business processes for Prolific North, we created an automatic newsletter generator, which can then be customised. Based on searchable criteria, this generator marks up relevant items of content and creates an overview of the latest and most relevant news, features, jobs and event listings. A content editor is then able to filter, edit and rearrange the email, before distributing it seamlessly via Mailchimp, Dotmailer and similar applications.

Installing a flexible CMS, we were able to provide Prolific North with improved control over their content.

With moderation workflows in place, each content item transfers from draft to review and publication, ensuring that the right people are able to maintain control. To keep all content consistent in quality, we ensured that only administrators are able to publish to the live site.

Helping to streamline these workflows, we defined 7 different content types, each with their own distinct edit page: basic, features, news, events, jobs, freelancers, landing pages. Selected content can also be promoted as a featured item on the site’s homepage, for maximum visibility. Content editors now have increased control of their publications, with minimum effort.

In order to provide an engaging and attractive site, we enabled Prolific North to embed media-rich content, such as images, Youtube videos, Soundcloud attachments, podcasts, Google Maps, and more.

We enabled this by building the site using Drupal’s flexible components. Each page is capable of supporting a variety of different content types, easily configured into whatever arrangement the administrator may choose.