ASC Digital Publishing Platform

A consult on a stalled project to split a 10+ year old site in two while compiling content spread across several disparate backends into a single CMS turned into the first all-encompassing digital publishing platform for a 100+ year old camera society & its journal of filmmaking & cinema history.

Originally brought in to look at 2 years and 2 companies worth of work, it became apparent that a whole new direction was needed to accomplish the project’s mission. Brought in full time and given necessary rein to bring it to fruition, I pivoted the existing production to an incredible designer Trent Walton and his team Paravel, who brought in their wonderful developer partner Happy Cog who continue to support the platform today.

Given the project’s budget and timeframe, and the mountain of practical and time-consuming work to transcode all of the existing content to the new site, for the design we focused on clear and clean elements that could be written into the backend so our writers could focus on writing, editing, and laying out their articles while the platform handled the heavy lifting on the design and code.

To help with this beyond project direction/management and coordination with the ASC leadership, project team, and vendors I played a hands-on role in the page layout process, using Trent’s elements to design the homepages and many of the non-iterating page designs. As the one-man band behind the media transcode process, I personally upscaled all of the 100+ video archive to HD and re-uploaded them to our new Vimeo account, which we then began to use the private embed function to create subscriber/member/single-purchase viewer only pages on the site. This system, in parallel with the live-streaming productions we originated greatly upgraded the Society’s video publishing capabilities from outdated to cutting-edge. For the first time, live video access to Society and the Clubhouse, from members-only to their full international audience, became available to all.

After our successful on-time launch I continued to work with Happy Cog to build out the Craft CMS backend until we accomplished our goal of complete author-empowerment while providing the magazine’s sales staff expanded and higher-quality opportunities for sponsorship and advertising offerings.

With the sites and CMS complete and the staff onboarded and publishing on the site, I focused the remaining two vital sectors of the platform: archive and e-blasts. For the archive I worked with ASC member and Archive chair Chris Chomyn and his crack volunteer team to complete their multi-year effort to define an index to cover the entirety of the magazine’s scope in its coverage of the industry since 1920. Using this I developed an original CRM Indexing Web Tool and onboarding documentation to allow users to easily add information to any issue that would automatically be converted to the index. This led to over 50 years of the magazine being indexed to date, with efforts continuing until completion.

For the 70k mailing list weekly e-blasts I developed an entirely new web template of assets to match the new websites’ looks, and in the process in-housed production of them saving a great deal of time and money while optimizing production and sponsorship support to new levels. Along with giving the emails their second ever makeover/first unified theme and taking over responsibility for building and sending emails while coordinating with our sales team and their sponsors I learned a great deal about consumer efficacy and the important unique characteristics of everyone involved in the production pipeline. I’m proud of our strong subscriber hold numbers we were able to achieve after implementation to with the all-new signup programs I implemented, along with the significant improvement in visual experience and savings to the company.