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Overview
Published weekly from its offices in Middleburg, Virginia since 1937, The Chronicle of the Horse is the nation's leading source of news and results for the entire sport horse industry.
The Chronicle’s old website built with static HTML pages was in a desperate need for a database backend and redesign of the entire look and feel.
Challenge
Enable The Chronicle of the Horse Magazine to take full advantage of the new Internet technologies instead of just displaying content on the www.
Solution
The Chronicle of the Horse Magazine replaced old static HTML website with the PLANet w3 CMS system solution for use by all their staff in Editorial, Sales and Management.
Results
PLANet Systems Group’s expertise and Customized software solutions enabled The Chronicle to take full ownership of their Subscriptions Management, Website Content and Live reporting from the local races to Olympics in Athens 2004. All of which resulted in the increase in the number of monthly Subscriptions to the Magazine and in the number of visits to the Website and an all together powerful presentation of The Chronicle of the Horse company on the web.
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Click on the image above to see slideshow preview of The Chronicle of the Horse website
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Full Story
Website Design and Structure Far Off From the Printed Issue
The printed issue of the Chronicle of the Horse Magazine had modern looks, it was well structured, the information you are looking for, always close at hand. However, their website did not follow. Due to the static character of the pages, the Design Changes were almost impossible, unless you wanted to manually edit thousands of html pages. That made the selection of our first task easy. We had to get all of their content into our PLANet w3 CMS system, to be able to dynamically display pages on the Chronicle's new website.
PLANet w3 CMS System, supported by our utility tools built in FileMaker Pro like PLANet SQL, was able to strip the HTML code out of the static pages and move tens of thousands of Articles, Event Reports, Results, Images and other content items to a database.
With only one webmaster with limited HTML knowledge, we had to educate the Chronicle Staff, Sales and Editorial on how to best utilize the PLANet w3 CMS system. Thanks to intuitive and easy PLANet w3 CMS Interfaces The Chronicle staff was in no time having fun with changing the content of their development website with WYSIWYG Editor and making big plans for the future on the world wide web.
PLANet w3 CMS Modules bring revenue
Subscriptions management for the Chronicle at the Horse at this point was completely outsourced by a third company, making it really hard for the Chronicle Management to have insight into their revenue generation. The best solution was of course to enable Chronicle Staff to manage the Subscriptions in-house; however, the third company was also in charge of sending the Magazine’s printed issue to the subscribers, so we built a database communication interface between the two Companies.
That’s where PLANet w3 CMS System Subscription Manager Module came to play. The Chronicle utilized our system to start on-line Subscriptions within their website, while Subscription Manager took care of notifying the third company about the new subscribers and the details needed to ship the Magazine to them.
Online Classifieds was another PLANet w3 CMS Module utilized by the Chronicle to generate revenue online. The opportunity to publish the ads in the printed issue and/or online, was quickly adopted by the Chronicle Subscribers.
Banner Manager PLANet w3 CMS Module was yet another revenue generating aspect of the PLANet w3 CMS system. Automatic, Category sensitive Banner Display, with a powerful CMS interface enabled Chronicle Staff to control their Banner Ad sales quickly and with ease, which was not the case before, due to the size and complexity of the old static website.
Real-time Assistance to Subscribers
To enable The Chronicle's staff to give better service to their Subscribers, we integrated the Inquiry forms and automatic email notification system, to track all login errors and enable the support staff at Chronicle to help their Subscribers in real-time.
Real-time Reporting brings more Subscribers
PLANet w3 CMS System enabled the Chronicle Editorial staff to bring the news to their Subscribers in real-time. The Chronicle of the Horse Results Tracker we built was a valuable resource, but the need for live reporting was evident with the upcoming Olympics in Athens in 2004. The solution to this problem was utilizing PLANet w3 CMS Photo Gallery, News and LIVE! Modules. We have set up the system so that the Chronicle Reporters could report Live from Athens. The Reporters took photos with digital cameras and wrote text using their Notebooks. Upon finishing, they would upload their content to the PLANet w3 CMS and within minutes entire galleries of Images and minute by minute reports were being displayed on the Chronicle's website, enabling Chronicle Subscribers to follow all Equestrian events that took place in Athens that summer. After the Olympics, The Chronicle embraced this system for real-time reporting from all major Equestrian events in the States and Europe.
Traffic and User Behavior Analysis
One of the most important tasks in the PLANet w3 CMS implementation for The Chronicle of the Horse Magazine, was, of course, the analysis of Traffic and User Behavior on their website. By customizing the PLANet CMS w3 Log Analyzer module, we were able to provide the Chronicle Management with the detailed statistics about the Website Traffic, user movement through the site, most visited Articles and Galleries, most popular authors etc.
Conclusion
PLANet Systems Group's custom implementation of the PLANet w3 CMS System for The Chronicle of the Horse was a big success. It started a 4yearlong successful cooperation between the two companies at mutual pleasure. The Chronicle received a powerful web presence, online revenue generation, plus loads of useful data to analyze and to base future business decisions on, and we got yet another valuable, happy Customer.
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