Living Magazines

The challenge

Berkhamsted Living Magazine and Tring Living Magazine are quarterly local lifestyle publications which are popular with residents, former residents and visitors. In 2018, new owners wanted a fresh, dynamic and fully responsive website to support a new digital and social media strategy and drive traffic and online advertising revenues. This included a new daily news feed and overhauling the What’s On section to make it the go-to place for local events.

Our solution

Living Magazines staff and users create high levels of content to keep the website current. The choice of platform was essential. We recommended WordPress. It supports social media activity, is attractive to potential online advertisers and has an intuitive user-friendly content management system.

Using Living Magazine’s new colour palette, we worked closely with their in-house graphic designer on a theme which was more energetic and appealing to younger people and with a dynamic home page.

A dedicated project manager kept the Living Magazines team updated and made sure deadlines were met. Content was managed and added to the site using a template system called Gather Content.

To make the What’s On section easier to use, we developed a simple form for event organisers to add items. An RSS feed to automatically share the events to social media.

The results

• In the first six months, traffic to the new site grew by 151%
• Once visitors arrived, they were also spending longer on each page
• Local groups have become familiar with listing events which is also helping to increase traffic to the site