WordPress news portal development with an e-magazine

The WordPress news portal for the Latvian Association of Civil Engineers (LBS) brought three needs together on one site: a regular flow of industry news, space for advertisers and a paid publication online. Our work was developing the association’s portal, and CREATING.LV handed it over in 2020.

LBS is a construction industry organisation that publishes the magazine “Būvinženieris” (Civil Engineer), which came out six times a year. The association needed a portal to publish both its own and its partners’ news, place advertising banners and offer the magazine to read online. The e-magazine was intended for registered users after payment.

CREATING.LV built the news portal of the Latvian Association of Civil Engineers on WordPress. The portal development covered:

• the portal’s visual design and user flow;
• home page news blocks for the association’s own and partner news;
• advertising banner positions on the home page and in the sidebar;
• a section for the magazine “Būvinženieris” and e-magazine subscriptions with their own access logic;
• an adapted mobile version for use on a phone.

In addition to the news and advertising banners, e-magazine subscriptions were the only separate feature we developed. The portal footer said “Made by CREATING.LV”.

The main menu had Home, News, Certification, the magazine “Būvinženieris” and About us sections, as well as search, a basket and signing in to or joining the portal. The “Certification” section was informative, and the basket was for the e-magazine subscription. On the home page, news is divided into thematic blocks: “Top news” with featured publications, “Industry news”, “LBS news” and “Products. Technologies. Innovations”.

In each block, a news item has an image, a category and a headline, so readers can see straight away whether it is association news or industry news. The lower part of the home page also has a photo block and a video block with a list of videos.

The thematic blocks let each reader start with what interests them: those interested in the association’s work open LBS news, while those interested in products and technologies open the relevant block. The photo and video blocks allow photos and videos to be published alongside articles, not just text. Search helps find older publications that are no longer visible on the home page.

On the portal, LBS publishes both its own and its partners’ news. After the portal had been built and set up, LBS staff could publish news and e-magazine issues themselves. This way readers find both the association’s news and information from other industry players in one place, while the association can offer its portal to partners as a place to reach the industry audience.

Advertising banners are placed in several positions on the portal: at the top of the home page, between the news blocks and in the sidebar. Free positions showed the invitation “Free space for your advertisement”, and a separate row showed partner and industry event logos with links.

Fixed banner positions let the association offer advertisers a specific position on the page, and advertisers can see the free positions on the portal itself. The positions at the top of the home page, between the news and in the sidebar have different visibility, so advertisers have a choice.

The magazine “Būvinženieris” has its own section on the portal with the latest issue featured, and the sidebar has invitations to subscribe to the magazine and read it online. We created special access logic for the e-magazine: the magazine can be leafed through, but the pages cannot be zoomed in. To read the magazine with zoom, a subscription has to be paid for separately.

A subscription can be chosen for a month, a quarter or a year, and longer periods have a discount.

Leafing through without zoom works as a preview: readers see the size of the issue, the layout of the articles and the topics, but only a subscriber can read the text comfortably. Several subscription periods let readers choose between a short trial and a longer subscription with a discount.

The reader’s path to the e-magazine is as follows:

• they open the magazine section or the sidebar invitation “Subscribe to the magazine and read online”;
• they leaf through the magazine, without being able to zoom in on the pages;
• they register or sign in to the portal and choose a monthly, quarterly or annual subscription;
• they pay for the subscription;
• they read the e-magazine online with zoom on the same portal.

Because access is tied to the user account, after signing in to the portal subscribers can return to the magazine without paying each time.

If a similar portal also includes a paid publication, you need to decide at the start how much of each issue to show for free, what the subscription periods and discounts will be, how readers will renew a subscription when the period ends, and what they will see if their subscription is no longer active.

A news portal with an e-magazine brings both together on one site. If the news and the paid publication are on different sites, readers have to switch between them, and the publisher has to maintain two systems. On one WordPress portal, news articles and sidebar invitations lead readers to the magazine section, while registration, subscription payment and reading happen right there.

The portal’s visual design and user flow were our work: thematic news blocks with images, banner positions on the home page and in the sidebar, and a magazine section with the latest issue featured. We also built an adapted mobile version so that the news and the magazine section can be used on a phone. News is often read on a phone, for example when opening a link from an email or social network, so the article, search and the invitation to subscribe have to be easy to use on a small screen too.

Building the news portal on WordPress meant that the news, its categories, the banner positions and the magazine section were published in one content management system, while the e-magazine subscription and access logic was built into the same portal. WordPress is an open-source content management system in which news is published as posts with a headline, image, category and publication date, so posts can be filtered by category and found with search.

Today the association’s address redirects to another site built by another developer. This description refers to the portal we handed over in 2020, so a link to the current site is not shown.

A portal like this suits an industry organisation, association or publisher that regularly publishes news, wants to sell advertising space and offer its publication online with a subscription.

To start a similar project, our website development service and the article on WordPress website development will be useful. For the Latvian Association of Civil Engineers’ competition, we also built a competition website with voting.

• Website development

This portfolio entry reflects the solution as delivered at handover. The current website may have changed.