Case Study
Helping Macedonian Media Outlets Revamp Their Look for Better Online Presence – Media for All supported by British Council
SmartClick got the opportunity to work on several development projects as a result of the collaboration with the British Council. All of the media outlets were supported by the British Council and needed to be revamped or built from scratch. This project was part of the ”Media for All” programme that started in September 2019 and ended in June 2022. All of these media outlets are supporting the youth and young journalists in Macedonia as well as editors, owners and audiences across the Western Balkans to know how to run and maintain their websites and improve their online presence.
SmartClick got the opportunity to work on several development projects as a result of the collaboration with the British Council. All of the media outlets were supported by the British Council and needed to be revamped or built from scratch. This project was part of the ”Media for All” programme that started in September 2019 and ended in June 2022. All of these media outlets are supporting the youth and young journalists in Macedonia as well as editors, owners and audiences across the Western Balkans to know how to run and maintain their websites and improve their online presence.
Responsibilities
The main activities that were to bring success to the project
Improving the design
Improving the website structure
Improving the website architecture
Building websites from scratch
Improving website functionality
The Project
The problem: The collaboration consisted of revamping or building a new website from scratch for the media outlets participating in the “Media for All” programme. The main people responsible for each website were not IT fluent, so explaining how to upgrade the website further or maintain them was the major problem. From a developer perspective, there weren’t any problems with the building of the sites, as they were (all except for one) done in WordPress.
Our perspective of the issues: Each website had its own challenges, and needed the improvement of different functionalities. All of them were built according to designs that SmartClick has prepared in advance. It was our job to help each of the website administrators to understand how to easily fill their websites with new information or upgrade it in futute. WordPress was used for all media websites except for one, for which Joomla was used as a website builder platform.
Our client’s take on the project: As Danilo states in his testimonial, there were numerous difficulties and challenges regarding the expectations from the website owners, but SmartClick’s team has managed to overcome the issues and finalize the project with a smooth customer satisfactory experience.
Client info
The British Council supported a programme called “Media for All” that provided expert monitoring, training and support for local media outlets across Western Balkans to engage more effectively with their audiences in relations with their financial stability, improvement of gender equality in the workplace and providing tailored business development support.
The Client’s Collaboration Highlights
An exciting challenge completed by SmartClick that brought smooth customer experience!
I’ve had the pleasure of working with SmartClick’s team of developers on the project Media for All. We were working on the development of a series of web sites where Milan had successfully coordinated his team, responded to all challenges within the timeframe. The project had numerous difficulties and challenges from an expectation setting perspective – but I was so happy that he was leading his side and the team delivered as agreed. Thanks to that we managed to finalise everything on time and to provide a smooth customer experience in the end. Would like to work with SmartClick on similar projects in the future.
The Challenge
The biggest challenge was related to the fact that the website owners were not tech savvy and knew little about website scalability and maintenance; however, with a clean structure and easy set navigation, their websites are now easy to upgrade and fill with information.
The Impact on the Client
The Media outlets now have modern websites that function properly and are scalable and easy to maintain. They are able to provide excellent user experience to their visitors and do so in a facilitated way. The current Media outlets have all the elements a properly optimized website should have, so we can say that they have an improved online presence and better visibility than before.
Services
What we provided to achieve the product
Technologies & plugins used to build the website:
WordPress, Joomla, ACF, NPM, SCSS, JS, JQUERY, PHP