Pat’s Picks
Overview
Live Site
www.patspicks.comClient Since
August 2009
If you’re a New Yorker, you know Pat Kiernan. He’s a New York news anchor known best for his dry wit and smart delivery of the news. Pat has two other significant interests: occasional game show host and his personal website Pat’s Papers. His website is the place where his three interests intersect: fresh news, offbeat humor and interesting trivia, presented in an easily digested format.
Pat came to Hop Studios with a popular working website that was made in Joomla and was a brute to update. He wanted to polish the design (of course) but most importantly to make his site much easier to update and publish, so he could focus on the content of his site, not the daily grind of production.
Services Provided
Moving Pat’s Papers over to the ExpressionEngine CMS was the key to the success of the project. It’s estimated that Pat and his assistant now take less than half the time each day to produce the site, and the final product is in fact more intricate than the original site was, with finer control over the editorial product and layout.
Designwise, the site doesn’t look that different, but no part of the original site ended up untouched. From the headlines, fonts, logo, navigation and more, everything was tightened up and made uniform. We widened the central column width, added a leaderboard ad position, and integrated Twitter feeds for the @patkiernan and @PKtips twitter accounts. Useful widgets have been added to the sidebar, and this is the first Hop Studios site to use Disqus, a third-party comment tool. We’ve also made Facebook, Twitter, and Yahoo sharing links on the blog permalink pages.
Testimonial
I appreciate the work Hop Studios does for me in terms of visual design. But the reason I'm a long-term client is for the emphasis on content. Before they get anywhere near the suggestion of what my site should look like they dig into the content. They analyze what I'll be putting on the site and why, and offer expertise on how it's likely to be consumed by my readers.
Pat KiernanNotes & Takeaways
The new version of the site is packed with goodies to increase audience engagement and to ensure content is well-displayed in search engines and on Twitter. And though the site has been up just a week, it’s already seen a significant increase in traffic from better search engine visibility (and from the fact that Pat can produce more content each day in the same amount of time.)
We've Blogged About This Project
- November 16, 2009
Daily News in Bite-Sized Chunks: Pat’s Papers