Beano.com

Beano.com is an award-winning digital network visited by more than a million kids a month

CMS, New builds

Beano is the world’s longest-running comic, published by DC Thomson. One of the UK’s most recognised brands, the comic has created iconic characters like Dennis and Gnasher, The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx - in fact, there are over 2,000 characters in their archive! First published in 1938, with more than 4,000 issues released, The Beano is a beloved brand that generations of British children have grown up with. Now in its ninth decade, it has evolved through a world war, a new millennium and the advent of digital as a medium. Today, beano.com is an award-winning digital network visited by more than a million kids a month, full of quizzes, games and of course, a whoopee cushion.

www.beano.com

What we worked on

Consultancy

React Development

WordPress.com VIP

System integration

Migration

WordPress

Increasing development velocity with open source

Beano.com is a well researched website that was run on a custom platform in need of change to make further development more flexible and still be cost effective. The Beano.com team did not want to undo the years of research that had led to an incredibly well-performing site, but under the surface, they wanted to rebuild the whole thing in WordPress.

To be able to migrate the huge volume of content, some unique ways to process this was needed. For example, a couple GB of images needed to be sanitized, processed and uploaded alone, and across multiple different content formats such as quizzes and games.

High performance with WordPress.com VIP

WordPress.com VIP is an enterprise hosting offering that powers many of the world’s most trafficked websites and biggest global brands.

As WordPress.com VIP partners, we were able to ensure that Beano.com had the same performance as before but on a new flexible platform. As a relatively new partner to WordPress.com VIP, this involved some learning by our team to ensure that the application and infrastructure worked in beautiful harmony.

For further improved performance, analytical processes were also optimized together with the Beano.com team to avoid resource overhead.

Gutenberg and a whoopee cushion

Custom Gutenberg blocks – in order to support the content for Beano.com and maximise the editorial flexibility of the site, we had to design (in a technical sense) and build custom Gutenberg blocks which supported the incumbent site’s functionality, UX and design. This was no mean feat with several highly involved custom blocks.

Another critical part of the Beano.com experience is the related content. Our team worked with the Beano.com team to reverse engineer the related content algorithm from the previous site and re-create it in WordPress based on taxonomies.

The original site had an interactive whoopee cushion. Of course, of all the project goals, ensuring continuity of service for the whoopee cushion was top 😉

Analytics integration with kids’ protection in mind

The analytics integration for the original website was sophisticated, extensive and had evolved over many years, all with the mandate that it must be entirely protective of kids’ data. Unpicking all of this logic and implementation and recreating it in a brand new WordPress-based site was a process that involved intense collaboration, testing and iteration with the client team.

If you’re facing challenges similar to those at Beano, don’t hesitate to reach out to us at Angry Creative. We’re ready to guide you through, starting with a meeting with our expert, Amy Slade. Book a meeting today!

Angry demonstrated a deep understanding of WordPress at each stage of the re-platforming, guiding us to the best technical solutions for migrating the surprising complexity that sits under the hood of Beano.com.

The team at beano.com

During the project, Angry felt like an extension of the Beano team with any challenges met with a smile. The final product has exceeded our expectations in delivering a pixel perfect re-creation of Beano.com and we’re confident our most ardent fans would struggle to distinguish the WordPress site from it’s previous version.

THE TEAM AT BEANO.COM

Our editors have found WordPress enhanced their workflows, enabling them to get the very fresh fart jokes, games and quizzes into the hands of fans quicker than ever before!