I spent nine months in 2014 designing, building and iterating an Android app called Metro10 for the UK Newspaper Metro. This taught me a lot about the benefits and frustrations of native app development and marketing. The benefits of app users are huge in terms of their engagement and propensity to return daily. Being able […]
For the past four years I have been working in an editorial environment Metro, the third largest daily UK newspaper. Over this time I have been amazed at the number of times that serious change has been attempted and failed. This seems to be a common problem with newspapers. Initially it confused me as there […]
The majority of content placement on metro.co.uk is now managed by software. This has been a long journey based on real world feedback and incremental addition of complexity. My goal has always been to take a developer’s view of the editorial process and optimise where possible. Looking at the numbers it became clear that for […]
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 […]
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 […]
About six months ago I was sitting in a CTO meeting across DMGT and they were trying to come up with ways that we could improve collaboration across the group. After a few suggestions around wiki based API pages I came up with the idea to run a Hackathon. In my experience the best […]
Why Metro decided to choose WordPress VIP as their CMS and front end platform including a few things to watch out for if you take this path.
Over the past 12 months I have been working with an amazing team of people at Metro the largest free daily newspaper in the world to migrate their existing bespoke CMS and move them to WordPress with hosting provided by WordPress VIP. The press were invited in this week and the management team started to […]