Challenge
The Problem Pewter Report is the Tampa Bay Buccaneer’s most trusted news site and ranks in the top 1% of websites nationwide for overall traffic. When they came to Visual Realm for help they were working with a well know web firm in Tampa. Their website was thrown into a $55 template with little customization. The site was slow, bulky, and not mobile friendly. The backend of the website was confusing and cumbersome for the many writers contributing articles. The driving force behind the website is a huge Buccaneers Football forum with tens-of-thousands of active daily users. This database was not integrated into the WordPress platform causing extremely high monthly hosting bills as well as a frustratingly slow load time. When the site would experience an influx of traffic during the NFL draft, training camp or football game day, the hosting server would crash causing the it to go offline and the readers to go elsewhere. This was extremely problematic as sponsors depend on these high traffic times for ad visibility and fans depend on it for the most up-to-the-minute news.
Solution
We moved Pewter Report to a much more sustainable, customizable theme and also reverse engineered their booming forum to work directly with the WordPress platform through bbPress and BuddyPress. The tampa web design was given a major face lift with an update to the fonts, colors, layout and more. New and popular articles were given better on-page visibility to promote click throughs. Advertisement placement was completely reformulated to benefit both the readers and the sponsors. After integrating the site database with the forum database Visual Realm moved Pewter Report to an extremely robust hosting platform to handle the high traffic spikes and stay online when big news hits. We are proud to report that since we made this transition in 2016, they have not experienced any outages, downtime, or exorbitant overage hosting bills due to traffic. This was the biggest problem they faced prior to working with Visual Realm.
Results
Pewter Report is experiencing their highest traffic numbers in history and have been able to increase their staff to continue on this successful path. They have increased forum users, page views, unique visitors, social media presence. With the dependable hosting server backing up larger file formats, they have launched a podcast and PRTV featuring video news reports. Pewter Report is signed up under one of our most popular monthly retainer programs. Keep an eye out for more exciting things happening in the partnership as we continue to launch new sites and programs with them.
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