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London
Design Works
Design and build for complex organisationsLondon · Est. 2009
Sectors / Publishers

Digital for publishers

A publishing platform is a large archive, a daily deadline and a business model all running through the same CMS. Twenty years of content has to stay findable, editorial has to move fast, and the paywall has to know who has already paid. Most of the difficulty is in the joins.

Talk it through
020 3608 2525
Bring your archive and your subscriber list. We'll be straight about what's hard.

What usually needs fixing

The archive is a black box

Twenty years of content sits in a taxonomy nobody quite trusts, so search gets worse the more you publish.

Editorial fights the CMS

Extra required fields and a slow save button turn every article into friction on the worst hour of the day.

The paywall doesn't know the reader

Metering, subscriptions and print entitlements live in separate systems, so a paying subscriber still hits a wall.

Systems we integrate with

Typical publishing stack

No two publishers run the same stack. These are the systems that come up most often, and the ones we plan for at architecture stage rather than discover halfway through a build.

01

CMS and editorial workflow

The system editorial lives in all day. It has to be fast, and it has to hold twenty years of history without slowing down.

WordPress VIPDrupalArc XPBrightspotSanityEscenic
02

Subscriptions and paywall

Metering rules and entitlements that agree with each other, so a subscriber never has to prove they've paid twice.

PianoZephrTinypassRecurlyChargebeePressReader
03

Payments and billing

Recurring billing, failed-payment recovery and print-plus-digital bundles reconciled to one subscriber record.

StripeGoCardlessBraintreeWorldpay
04

Search and taxonomy

A controlled vocabulary the archive can be trusted to search against, not a folder structure dressed up as one.

ElasticsearchAlgoliaSolr
05

Email and audience

Newsletters and audience segments that stay true to subscription status without a manual export.

DotdigitalMailchimpCampaign MonitorPiano Audience
06

Analytics and ad tech

Measurement built for a publisher's real questions — engagement and retention, not just traffic — with consent handled properly.

GA4Google Ad ManagerChartbeatParse.lyOneTrustWCAG 2.2 AA

How we build the joins

An integration is not finished when data moves. It is finished when it fails safely, and someone knows.

One system of record

We agree early which system owns each field, so nothing overwrites anything by accident.

Queued, not fragile

Transactions queue and retry. An outage delays a sync; it never loses a record.

Visible failures

Errors surface to a named person with enough detail to act, rather than sitting in a log.

Swappable

Providers change. We keep integrations behind a boundary so replacing one is a job, not a rebuild.

Then hand it to your team

The point of the architecture is what it lets your team do afterwards. Publish on deadline, adjust the paywall, launch a new section, migrate an archive, without a ticket and without us.

Fast editorial toolsPaywall and metering rulesArchive searchNewsletter publishing
Photograph selected for the Publishers sector

Send us your publishing stack

Tell us which CMS, which paywall provider and what has to keep working on deadline. Thirty minutes is usually enough to say whether it is a six month job or a two year one.

020 3608 2525