Our Work

The aim of the relaunch was to broaden and enhance the coverage of 1843 beyond Europe to include America and Asia. The new magazine includes profiles of headline-makers from The Economist, a fashion shoot in every issue and in-depth travel narratives. The magazine also extended its coverage to new sections devoted to tech, food and drink, art, design, and body and mind. The redesigned site had a specific aim to go live on March 9 2016 to coincide with the print issue hitting newsstands with an April/May cover. We had to ensure that the very same day the website went live smoothly with all the new functionalities, features, as well as all former Intelligent Life content and social accounts. The app also transitioned from Intelligent Life to 1843.

Following the designs provided by the 1843 team we built a fully responsive tile based layout for the website and adjusted the existing page layouts to align with the brand changes.

To get the best out of the layout possibilities we provided full editorial control over the home page and section page tiles with a lot of possible permutations of colours, opacity, sizes and positions of the images, texts and overlays. Due to the complexities of the design, the styling needed to be well maintained and flexible. We created a number of pieces of custom functionality to support this, allowing rapid adjustments to fonts, spacing and layout.

We also provided the editorial team with the possibility to make different dimension image crops from one single uploaded high resolution image to ensure the appropriate display on different size tiles. To help the editorial team create the best look for the article tiles we created preview functionality that allows the editors to check the end result before publishing the article to live.

Besides re-theming the existing Drupal 7 website, we also created new content types and adjusted a few existing ones to support the new website functionality. The app delivered to Android and iOS devices is also fed by the site, and the templates for it were updated accordingly.

The information architecture of the site was adjusted to meet the new content strategy and business requirements. It was essential to ensure appropriate redirection of former Intelligent Life website content after switching to 1843magazine.com

The project required SEO and website security improvements that we delivered in collaboration with The Economist team.

As the website went live without a paywall, 1843 relies more heavily on advertising for revenue. We improved and built more flexible advertising possibilities to create more commercial opportunities for brand partners. With these, they can create highly customised content in partnership with the editorial team, particularly around in-stream video ads.

We have also enabled Etear advertisement preview functionality to provide the editors with the possibility to check the correct display of advertisements before publishing them.

URL: https://www.1843magazine.com/

During the well-structured and productive project a lot was delivered in a very short period of time. The result being a really appealing website with enhanced editing tools that provide a lot of flexibility to the editorial team.

• Improved imagery with a lot of built in flexibility

• Full editorial control over the tiles with a lot of possible permutations

• Very complex project was delivered in a short period of time

• Improved security and SEO

• A smooth transition from Intelligent Life to 1843.

• Website statistics, comparing the results to the same period last year (March 7 to May 19th for both years):

  • Page Views : increased by 227%

  • Visits: increased by 295%

  • Unique visitors: increased by 263%