Scaling and rebranding a global publisher experiencing explosive growth

Guiding Tech started as a WordPress blog offering technology tips. However, the technology boom in the last decade¹ led to Guiding Tech expanding into explainers, buying guides, analysis (and more) as they gradually outgrew their early blog foundations. They reached out to Miranj to reimagine their platform from the ground-up.

Approach

The project kicked off with a hands-on workshop to understand the client’s challenges and aspirations. Based on our learnings we drafted a new information architecture, re-modelled existing content and laid the foundations for future formats. We also moved Guiding Tech to a modern, content-first CMS called Craft, including programmatic migration of thousands of posts published since the very beginning of the site in 2010.

Design

We approached the design by stripping it down to the bare essential — the article text — and proceeded content-out. We abstracted common patterns and created re-usable blocks for byte-sized content, rich cross-links, internal promotions, etc. This evolved into a robust design system on top of a flexible underlying scaffolding that supported a variety of content formats, experimental ad-slots, and more. We designed for high-intent users — people who are after very specific information — while allowing for cross promotion of relevant content with minimal disruption to the reader.

Scale

Guiding Tech is amongst the top 11k websites on the entire internet, and its traffic far outpaced any other project we had worked on so far. Performance takes a whole new meaning when a site is accessed by 50 to 100 people every second. This engagement gave us the opportunity to double down on and really push the limits of server-side optimisation. We managed to architect a system² that could handle the kind of massive concurrent loads that a 4‑million-unique-visitors-per-month clocking site like GT attracts while running on low-cost hardware.

Delivery

The project was executed over multiple phases tackling opportunities in design, author experience, technology and business intelligence.

With a globally distributed team that publishes dozens of articles each day, this project drove home the realisation that a website’s content authoring experience (AX) is as critical as the end-user experience (UX). We saw first hand the out-sized impact of micro optimisations such as reducing a click, or simplifying and merging two input fields into one, automating image watermarks, tagging relevant taxonomies, etc when deployed at scale.