Background
Regulation Asia is a financial news site specializing in writing unique news content pieces about Asian markets as they unfold. While the headlines and some excerpts are public on the website, the long form content is for subscribers only. Their customers are respected institutions and companies across Asia that need up-to-date info on recent rulings, regulations, statements from financial authorities, financial events, etc across the Asian markets.
Their existing Wordpress-based platform was no longer serving its purpose as a modern way of delivering content and managing content; pushing Regulation Asia to seek out a development partner that could together with them renew the platform from scratch. Given a strong referral, they were directed towards Makers’ Den.
Nick Wakefield
Co-founder at Regulation Asia
“They communicated incredibly well and gave complete confidence throughout.”
How we worked together
In the conversations we had in the weeks after the initial intro meeting, we analysed the issues at hand, the improvements to be made near term, as well as the future vision. Regulation Asia did the initial wireframing of the new website in-house, from which Makers’ Den could create a work breakdown and an initial estimate for the work needed, and deliver a budget for re-launching the site on a modern stack and the new features.
The budget was within Regulation Asia’s expectations and work commenced a few weeks after the contracts were signed.
The team from Makers’ Den consisted of a partner who acted as a project manager, as well as one full-time senior full-stack developer; and one part-time senior full-stack developer to script the content migration from Wordpress to Storyblok in parallel.
As all projects, it started with a Kickoff. Where all team members were introduced to Regulation Asia stakeholders and vice versa. Afterwards we continued meeting once a week, demoing the progress in a virtual meeting; and setting forth following weeks goals. For ad-hoc communication we utilized a shared Slack channel where all parties could respond in real-time in case of any immediate issues. Longer term task tracking was maintained in an Asana board which was updated every day, and made available to the client.
This was continued until our Asana board was empty, pending final production switch-over tasks. There were of course a lot of new surprising tasks in the course of development as Regulation Asia discovered further needs in the course of the project. This is normal and expected in most software development projects.
The Technical Setup
The Regulation Asia website was built using modern best practices for websites:
Content organized in Storyblok in a way intuitive for the content managers, allowing them to create and update pages without developer assistance,
Support for live previews for Content Managers so they could see changes in real-time as they edited, significantly streamlining the content creation process.
Comprehensive technical SEO implementation including customizable meta titles, descriptions, H1 tags, and OpenGraph image data to boost MeisterTask's search visibility.
Automatically generated SEO data for sitemaps and JSON+LD structured data to improve search engine understanding and feature rich results.
Exceptional performance metrics with high scores on Core Web Vitals, ensuring fast loading times and smooth user experience.
The core technologies used included:
Typescript - Providing type safety and improved developer experience throughout the project.
ReactJS - The frontend framework that allowed us to build a responsive, interactive user interface.
NextJS - Offering server-side rendering capabilities, optimized performance, and a robust development environment.
Storyblok - Our headless CMS of choice, providing Regulation Asia with flexible content management capabilities.
TailwindCSS - Enabling efficient styling with no runtime overhead, perfect for achieving the sleek, modern design Regulation Asia required.
Clerk - For subscribers & user authorization we opted to use an existing SaaS platform, which fit well given their user amounts but also facilitated faster time to market and solid user management features.
The Results
Regulation Asia launched a cutting-edge website that featured all their 23 000 articles from the previous site, but served with a new great UX/UI and with blistering speed. A site they were proud to showcase to employees, investors and clients.
Furthermore the website is now set up for expansion, ready to bring in an AI chat; a slew of better customer engagement features to set up the site for further growth into the future.
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