Sijthoff Media

Achieving multi-site excellence for a renowned publisher

When leading cross-media publisher, Sijthoff Media Groep, wanted to revive and reinvigorate one of its complex multi-site platforms, it turned to Youwe for help.

The platform was home to Binnenlands Bestuur, the largest news site in the Netherlands about government developments; Adformatie, a market leader in information for marketing, creative and communication industries; and SamSam, an educational platform for children. With a combined monthly audience of more than 2.5 million unique visitors, Sijthoff Media Groep needed these sites to perform.

Sijthoff Media’s mission is to help people and organizations achieve success through expertise, knowledge and networks. Above all, its content has to be of the highest quality, easily accessible, always available and intuitive to navigate.

Yet with multiple B2B and B2C brands, and an extensive editorial team, the company’s reliance on a blizzard of complex workflows had resulted in major challenges. From subscriptions, to promotional content and paid job listings, with input from hundreds of partners, the platform was struggling to service all its external and internal audiences.

As a major multi-brand publisher serving a range of brands across different editorial offices, Sijthoff Media was being pulled in different directions. Every audience had its own needs, targets and demands. Challenging customizations and increasing complexity were regular requirements of doing business.

Sijthoff Media needed help with what was a tough, highly technical project. Fortunately, Youwe was ideally placed to offer the expert assistance necessary to turn the platform around.

The highly intricate homepage was the pinnacle of the project.

Our solution

For maximum flexibility, the venture began as an open contract, allowing both parties to get a feel for the relationship.

It became very clear, very quickly, that the connection between Youwe and Sijthoff Media was a powerful one, with a collaborative approach that meant the highly complex editorial workflows could be tackled successfully.We started off with the migration of all content, including editorial posts, articles, author information and media libraries.

The highly intricate homepage was the pinnacle of the project.

Its complex, dynamic framework allows for a wide range of options to be served up to visitors. To the audience, it looks clean and simple, with blocks of content laid out for consumption. However, behind the scenes there’s a comprehensive system that assigns images, texts and background colors based on an extensive set of rules.

This dynamic homepage also features a large collection of partner content, displayed in carousel slots. This needs to be rotated, so that content of 200+ partners gets equal screen time, with a built-in algorithm that ensures content is served up fairly.

The results

Youwe proved itself to be a reliable online partner, more than capable of taking over the planning and deployment of Sijthoff Media’s flagship project.

The challenging preconditions, complex workflows, specific development specifications, rules, and automated testing were all handled with composure and decisiveness.

And that open contract? It turned out to be a huge success. The relationship quickly became formalized with a big maintenance contract and we are now working together to deliver a wide range of valuable new functionalities across their portfolio.

As the relationship continues to move forward, Youwe is becoming more involved in the group portfolio, so let’s see what the future brings for this superb collaboration.

Binnenlands Bestuur website results at-a-glance: