Building a Digital Media Brand: The Italian Job - Part 1

Bluespark took on a new challenge recently. In addition to working towards making Drupal a great platform for travel and building sites for some rather cool organisations, we are also further developing a recently-acquired online media brand entirely in-house. It happens to cover one one of our favorite subjects: Italian food, travel, art and culture. We are also going to blog the entire process, so this is just one in a series of blog posts where we share, frankly, the ups and downs of the process. We hope this information will be useful to others and that the experience gained will make us more useful to clients we consult with as we become far more aware of the entire range of challenges they face daily. We'll start with where we are now and also cover the major initiatives we are currently working on.

ITALY Magazine - The story so far

ITALY Magazine was an exclusively British-based print publication that started out in 1999. The website came a few years later and grew in a rather organic way to provide information and current news on Italy as well as listings for estate agents selling property in Italy and listings for accommodations and holidays. The interest in the topic and the quality of the content led to ITALY Magazine growing a faithful public that comes back time and time again to check for updates. When Bluespark acquired the company, monthly traffic was consistently over 100k unique visits and there was a growing Facebook page with about 30k fans. From a technical perspective ITALY Magazine is built using Drupal 7 - rather handy for us, as a Drupal-centric agency to implement our ideas.

ITALY Magazine - The Rebuild

The first step was to actually put together a team. Using people already involved with ITALY Magazine and growing that further we now have people dedicated to editorial, technical development and support, sales and business development. This core ITALY team also relies upon Bluespark for design, UX and tech skills. As a next step, we decided to put everything up for discussion. From branding, content strategy, social media strategy, information architecture, UX and underlying technical architecture we want to give ITALY the best possible chance at success. For some of these aspects this was the first time ITALY would actually have a strategy developed while for others it is a question of refining what is already in place. We can't wait to share with you the new logo and show to the world the completely redesigned site. However, we are already hard at work implementing some of the content strategy decisions we took. In the next post I will talk about how we grew traffic by about 50% in three weeks and how we increased our Facebook fans by 300%. Read Part II