PEI Media
Growth through e-commerce
E-commerce
PEI Media is an international financial media group that produces editorial, data, events and advertising products for alternative investments in the private equity market. The company has a portfolio of brands that it sells to private equity corporate clients. Typically, each brand is available as a magazine, website, paid newsletter, and a range of online and offline research and analytics data products.
What did we do?
WordPress
Consultation
Backend development
Front-end development
UX
Design
Outdated software and digital skepticism
The challenge was to develop the company’s multi-brand portfolio of eight websites. The company’s specialized premium business information products needed to be delivered via self-service e-commerce, while the platforms needed to offer the best editorial tools and a sleek front-end.
With some of the wealthiest and most influential people and organizations in the world as clients, this was a critical part of the project. We set the goal of producing a system that delivers intelligent and elegant syntheses of PEI Media’s editorial, data, events and advertising products.
E-commerce for growth
We produced a system that delivers intelligent and elegant syntheses of PEI Media’s editorial, data, events and advertising products. PEI Media now has a modern set of responsive websites that have sophisticated editorial features and can connect to a number of integrated systems, including e-commerce. We used WooCommerce and WordPress, and combined it with external identity management to create a scalable and smart e-commerce solution for the company.
A new customer experience for personalization has driven audience engagement and increased the number of sessions, session times, page views and repeat visits. Internally, there have also been benefits as PEI Media’s editors and journalists are now happier and freer to create and manage content themselves.
An elegant solution
We created intuitive interfaces to ease the workload of the editorial team and allow them to manage content production and presentation themselves without any technical input at all.
We also combined the e-commerce content with editorial and other web content and integrated it with Blaize, an identity and access management platform. Blaize provides a proxy that sits in front of the WordPress site and manipulates the pages it is connected to, as they are requested. The identity and access modules restrict access to content only to those who should have restricted access.
The architecture we implemented was complex and able to incorporate a number of different aspects. One reason Blaize was used was that it provides access to Googlebot so that it can index and correctly rank PEI Media’s websites, which affects their organic search rankings. The analytics data is fed into Elasticsearch and the REACT app was embedded into the WordPress pages so that data is retrieved and presented in the form of tables and graphical forms.
