Beano.com
Beano.com is an award-winning digital network visited by over a million children every month.
Marketing
Beano is the world’s longest-running comic, published by DC Thomson. As one of Britain’s most recognised brands, it’s home to iconic characters like Dennis and Gnasher, The Bash Street Kids and Minnie the Minx. With more than 2,000 characters in its archives. First published in 1938 and now counting over 4,000 issues, The Beano is a beloved brand that generations of British children have grown up with. Over nine decades, it has evolved through a world war, a new millennium and the rise of digital media. Today, beano.com is an award-winning digital network visited by over a million children each month, packed with quizzes, games and of course a whoopee cushion.
What did we do?
WordPress.com VIP
Back-end development
Interaction design
Consultation
React-development
Frontend-development
Faster development through open source
Beano.com is a well-researched website that originally ran on a custom-built platform, which needed to be replaced to allow for more flexible and cost-effective development. The Beano.com team didn’t want to lose the insights gathered over years of research that had shaped their high-performing site, but behind the scenes, they wanted to rebuild everything using WordPress.
To migrate such a vast amount of content, we had to develop several bespoke ways of processing data. For example, several gigabytes of images had to be organised, processed and uploaded individually, across multiple content formats such as quizzes and games.
What did the customer think of the collaboration?
High performance with WordPress.com VIP
WordPress.com VIP is an enterprise hosting platform powering many of the world’s busiest websites and biggest global brands.
As a WordPress.com VIP partner, we were able to ensure that Beano.com maintained its high performance on a new, more flexible platform. Being a relatively new VIP partner ourselves, this came with a learning curve, as we worked to ensure the application and infrastructure ran in perfect harmony.
To boost performance even further, we worked closely with the Beano.com team to optimize analytical processes and minimize resource overhead.
Gutenberg & a whoopee cushion
Custom Gutenberg blocks – To support the content on Beano.com and maximize editorial flexibility, we had to (technically speaking) design and build custom Gutenberg blocks that were compatible with the site’s existing functionality, UX and design. It was a demanding task involving several complex, bespoke blocks.
Another key part of the Beano.com experience is related content. Our team worked closely with the Beano.com team to rethink the previous site’s related content algorithm and rebuild it in WordPress, using taxonomies.
The original site featured an interactive whoopee cushion. Naturally, making sure it survived the transition was a top priority.
Analysintegration med skydd för barn som högsta prio
The analytics setup on the original site was sophisticated, extensive and developed over many years, always with the strict requirement of fully protecting children’s data. Extracting that logic and rebuilding it on a brand-new WordPress-based site involved close collaboration, rigorous testing and multiple rounds of iteration with the client team.
