Technical solutions for websites - Simple and easy

The cooperation between Luxnet and 24tv.ua started when the latter was not yet among the top 20 best websites in Ukraine. We began to work with the website that hardly differed from other websites - little personalization, lack of special details and attractiveness for users. But today 24tv.ua is one of the best websites in the country thanks to the automation of processes, optimization of editor's work and a comprehensive approach.

The average number of visitors to the website per month is 35 million people including 13 million unique users. The website increases its capacity and that requires sophisticated but easy-to-implement technical solutions. 24tv.ua is a convergent platform bringing together news from subsites, partners, and, first of all, from the 24 news television channel.

Today's information competition requires from platforms collaboration of numerous factors - a user wants to receive visually attractive news quickly and efficiently. A visitor of the website will unlikely become regular if the factors failed to work in perfect harmony.

Measure twice, KPI once

Statistics in news processes is very important. What news are the most attractive to users? Who creates such texts in the editorial office? Editors of 24tv.ua have access to special statistics in the rating format. Analytics help to understand who creates the most popular news and who makes the largest number of mistakes in texts.

Key Performance Indicators or KPIs provide a detailed statistics. Not all editors are comfortable working with Google Analytics, as the system is really useful for analysts and managers, but not for journalists. We created a separate special indicator board for 24tv.ua. This is unified data from many systems that help improve the work of the editorial office, understand deficiencies and immediately eliminate them. The data includes information about who is the author of a video or text, when the news was published, in which section and who worked with the material, as well as a number of views, the presence of errors, etc. One can make ratings on a piece of paper and discuss topics at evening meetings, but a comprehensive approach allows better evaluating the situation on the website, understanding what pleases users and what drives them away. A high-quality work, good design and literacy are sometimes directly proportional to the number of views.

Talking about the comprehensive approach, 24tv.ua allows showing the number of views of news inside the news itself. You will say that such a feature has almost every website. Yes, but we went further: we integrated the counter into the admin panel. That is, we show analytics of news written by a journalist at the control panel for his convenience. The author can see whether his news was read till the end by a user and compare this index with the average indicator on the site.

He sees whether sessions are ended on the website or whether his news was uninteresting for a visitor. The journalist can also track traffic, namely where a user "comes" to the article from. We added several other internal metrics to the website, but we will keep them secret :)

A single control panel - several websites

The 24tv.ua website provides links to themed subsites – Techno (Technologies), LifeStyle, Sports, Health, Education, Football, Likar (Doctor), Auto. All the subsites have their own target audience, that is, users who are interested in the themes. However, news from the subsites can be often useful for visitors of 24tv.ua. Therefore we added a feature allowing integrating news from other platforms into the 24 television channel news feed. But when a user navigates to a text, a subsite opens. There are two positive consequences: the website attracts a large target audience and activity on other platforms of 24tv.ua.

There is also good news for an editor: there is no need to go from one admin panel to another to find interesting news, for example, from the category Techno. There is a common control panel for all the websites allowing working quickly and conveniently. One attachment - one journalist logged into the platform.

We already know from our own experience that it is inconvenient either for a journalist or for an editor to use a separate control panel for each website. It is necessary to log in several times and besides that, it is much more difficult to integrate news from different websites. We saved journalists' time and editors' nerves, as well as combined specialized websites on a single platform where different journalists can work with them.

Simple convergence of complex things

It is no secret that in today's information space it is not enough for news companies, especially those who work with television materials, to have a single website. The media create accounts on social networks, broadcast on Smart TV and publish news on YouTube in order to retain users. In general, it takes a lot of time to work with the platforms: each social media requires different descriptions, headings or even video formats. We created a separate video platform for the 24tv.ua website which is able to integrate into the website and update the content appearing on the television channel.

Simply speaking, a video material is broadcasted on the TV. There are several releases of a news program and a journalist constantly improves the material: adds new details, corrects video or changes narration. If a content manager of the website updates the video material every time, it will be very inconvenient and not always on time. Our platform is able to take an updated video from the content management system of the television channel where a journalist creates the news and upload it again. We also have different video formats for different video platforms - Smart TV, YouTube and mobile apps.

We added the possibility of automatic uploading videos with headlines and a description of news from 24tv.ua to YouTube. This simplifies the work of a journalist who adds only tags to a video and saves time of an editor who has no need to track each video, as there are sometimes dozens of visual news every day.

Notifications for convenience

Time is money. Saved minutes, especially in large holding companies, are quite a good amount of money saved. But how is it possible to save time if news should appear on a website every few minutes?

There is a proverb saying that the devil is in the details. Convenience for an editor is also based on the little things. Small, personalized details working in perfect harmony create comfort for a manager and help the whole team work together seamlessly. Now we will provide some examples of such trifles saving time of the website's employees. There is nothing out of the ordinary at first glance, but these unique little features enhance the large system. The 24tv.ua website has two language versions: Ukrainian and Russian. It is no secret that the languages are always in competition with each other in the country's media space. The time spent for translating, in fact, deprives the website of unique users: a person will search for the news on a website that posted them faster.

Therefore we created special notifications. Every time a journalist writes a Ukrainian version of the news, a translator is notified. This has several positive consequences for the editorial office:

• A translator can work remotely. There is no need to constantly refresh the news feed to find out whether there is news for translation. It is enough to enter the admin panel.
   
• An editor is not distracted by translators. He does not have to draw up their "plan for the day": news can appear every hour or even more frequently and a translator learns about it by himself.
   
• Rapid publication of news in two languages attracts the largest possible audience.
   

But this is not the end of the story about notifications. Sometimes there is a lot of news and the human factor can work while writing texts: a journalist can make a mistake, misspell a name or write an illogical sentence. We created an interactive system for users to eliminate the shortcomings: if a visitor sees a mistake, he can press Ctrl+Enter. Then a pop-up window will appear where he can write a comment and send it to the editorial office. A notification will be received by the admin panel and journalists will correct the news immediately. All notifications work in real-time. Therefore these processes actually take minutes or even seconds and there is no need to spend hours searching for mistakes or articles to translate.

Integration for picture editors

Problems occur if the news requires a quick but conditional illustration. The majority of photos on the Internet are copyrighted. Some of them can be posted on the website referring to an author, some should be bought. But if it is an exclusive photo, copying it to another platform may be a violation of the law.

We created an internal photobank for journalists of the 24tv.ua website. It works like an online photo stock: everyone can add a photo to the bank, tag it and then use it for other materials. Therefore, there is no need to search for illustrations on the Internet. A journalist should only enter a search query and the photobank will provide a number of photos that can be used in the news.

And what are the conclusions?

24tv.ua is the website of the holding company. This means, first of all, large data sets - visual and textual. We streamlined the work of the platform to avoid "losing" users among all the information. It is important to understand that everything works in the complex: automation of processes for the website team allows saving time and not getting hung up on processes which earlier took extra hours. The integration of different platforms helps to attract as many users as possible, especially unique ones.

Everything works in real-time, so the interaction between the editorial office and users is immediately noticeable. High-quality SEO-optimization also plays a big role, as it combined with the speed and quality of content that allows news from 24tv.ua to be on top of search engines. The technical solutions, some of which were described above, do not play a major role in the success of the website, but only help it to develop quickly and efficiently.