Jurnal.md and Jurnaltv.md news sites.
Jurnal Trust Media is the first media holding company in the Republic of Moldova, which offers the public a complex editorial content: print media, television, radio, video. The president of Jurnal Trust Media is the publicist and playwright Val Butnaru, the founder of one of the first independent newspapers in the Republic of Moldova - Jurnal de Chișinău.
We already had some positive interactions with the guys from DGTA Media, so it was not a surprise that they invited us to solve some of the issues that people from Jurnal had stated. The most "painful" of them were:
We accepted this challenge, even if, for the first time, we agreed on working not on our technical recommendations and requirements. That includes the choice of the hosting environment and the hardware parameters.
Jurnal Trust Media has two web flagmen: Jurnal.md site (old newspaper site, which became a news portal) and Jurnaltv.md site (newcomer, also news site, but with an accent on their TV production). Ironically, namely, the news component gave us the most headache, as there was no difference between the news concepts of the site, except the fact that the TV site will have more video. Nevertheless, we managed to create pretty different UI/UX far from just "changing the colors".
Firstly, we created a mobile experience, because it was non-existent. The heavy multimedia load has put its imprint on both sites, but using different UX techniques and backend technologies, we managed to engage the user without losing functionality, including video and audio experience.
In addition to the design challenge, we had to reconsider ALL the web infrastructure of the holding, to create a new architecture. As usual, an additional provocation was the maintenance of the old news, so they could work perfectly in the new frontend/backend system.
