For the last two years I have been focused on the design, build and growth of Metro.co.uk utilising the WordPress VIP platform. Our approach consists of constant experimentation with both product and content which has returned a large set of data mixed with editorial feedback. This has been refined into a list of product guidelines […]
Metro 10 was born out of a desire to experiment with native mobile news reading experiences that solved a different problem to our already fully responsive website. We had an algorithm that allowed customisation and decided to use this as our data source. The concept of restricting the volume of content would help us differentiate […]
Responsive design was a key enabler of the strategy that enabled Metro to grow to 34m monthly uniques. It put the end user first and ensured our content looked the best it could at the time of render. We worked from the mobile screen up to the desktop and this enabled us to make quick […]
Metro10 is the first Android App that I have been involved in from concept to release in the Google Play store. It was designed, developed, tested and deployed in the first three months of 2014. We spent the entire process learning and here are details of 10 things that we learnt as part of the process. 1 – To begin the […]
We have been working on automating large parts of the content ordering on Metro.co.uk since our responsive redesign in Dec ’12. This has grown from managing a few widgets across the site to controlling the majority of the homepage. The below describes the process we went through to achieve this. The first step was to […]
Over the past 12 months Metro has been on an amazing growth curve. Some of it is being in the right place at the right time for algorithm changes but a lot of it was planning and then execution of a growth (hacking) strategy. Hack 1: Responsive Design We decided a responsive design would be […]
I have just setup some 301 redirects in order to remove /development from the URL of my blog and wrote a handy piece of SQL to simplify 301 redirect WordPress blog htaccess. Once you have made the changes you can update your redirects /wp-admin/options-permalink.php. The reason I am redirecting to the guid which is the […]
I needed a simple SQL script to help me restore WordPress backup localhost to ensure that I didn’t have to go through the pain every time that I wanted to bring my data to my local server. This worked really well and all you need to do is search and replace on local.blog to the […]
High performing teams can achieve unbelievable performance multipliers over sets of like minded individuals. I have spent the last few years working on building high performing teams and from this experience I have found the foundation of high performance is communication and trust. It takes time It is hard to get communication right within a […]
I have decided to give my server the final boost in my quest for ultimate cachability and install Varnish cache. It was a toss up between doing this and installing NGINX but I have a reasonably large set of rules in my .htaccess to prevent hackers and 301s so I figured the migration would be […]