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We designed a new WordPress editorial theme to support the collaboration of MEED and Mashreq Bank and the launch of their Construction Hub

About MEED / Mashreq

Established in 1957, MEED, has been integral to delivering business information and news, intelligence and analysis on the Middle East economies and activities ever since.

Mashreq has provided banking and financial services to millions of customers and businesses since 1967.

Mashreq Bank has partnered with MEED to create MEED Mashreq Construction Hub as part of its strategic focus on industry specialization.

What Challenges did we face?

The Meed Mashreq Construction Hub presents unique and specialised content with text, images and videos. The content must be easy to find with interlink between articles and easy to share on social networks.

The site must be responsive so it works on different devices and easy to administer.

The site design must be related to other MEED and Mashreq products but not a direct copy. Visitors to the site must see the site as a collaboration between the two companies and not a take over by one.

How did we help?

We build a bespoke website theme built on WordPress. We worked closely with the branding departments of both companies to create a website design that works for both.

We then worked with the content creators at MEED to produce a taxonomy, search tool and post linking. Our aim was to produce a site that users find informative and easy to use.

What were the results?

A microsite dedicated to news for the Construction Industry in the Middle East with the news covering six sectors with articles submitted by a variety of contributors specialist in their respective skillsets. Featured functionality include a mega style menu structure, assigning feature stories, top stories within each sector, showcasing video content, moving sections about and sharing content across social media channels

“With regards to the Hub, the client is very pleased and we thank you for the great work.”

Ahmad Samarah
Engagement Manager – MEED Advisory Services

Visuals/Infographics

Contact us or read more about the editorial theme we designed here

Data is a vital part of every business and is particularly critical in event and media companies. Managing your data and using it efficiently will help you to connect with your audience and maintain relationships.

However with websites, social media and other data collection tools, companies can easily lose control of their data – with small pockets of data being held in multiple locations.

The first park of any data management system design is deciding where the central data store is – e.g, the website, CRM or database system. Once this is decided, work needs to be done to integrate all your data entry sources with the central data store.

In this article we are looking at how your website data can be sent to the central data store.

At Miramedia, we use the leading WordPress form builder called Gravity Forms on our Mira.cx platform.

It is fantastically powerful, very flexible and you can easily create very sophisticated forms. Whilst it is possible to download entries as CSV or Excel files, and then uploaded them into a CRM, the best way is a full integration with your CRM. That way as soon as data is entered into the website it is sent across to the CRM. This ensures that your data is kept in one central point and removes duplication and version control issues.

There are 3 ways to integrate your CRM with your website:

1. Most CRM systems allow you to create webpages with just the forms. You can embed these forms into the site using an iFrame. This is an easy and quick solution as the data is written to the CRM at the point the user enters. There is no delay in the data arriving in the CRM and you can add data integrity checking at source (e.g. mandatory field checking).
   The downside to this method is that iFrames do not work that well on mobiles and they are not very good for SEO. In addition, user tracking on the form is lost and therefore, inbound marketing tracking is almost certainly lost.
2. As above but add branding to the form and link to it directly from the website
   This has the same advantages as above but works better on a mobile phone. You do lose the visitor once they visit the form however.
3. We can add an additional Add-On to Gravity Forms to handle the migration of the data and synch with the CRM. You can then edit the data mapping for each form linking the CRM to the form on the website.
   This means that data entered into a form on the website is automatically sent to your CRM.
   The advantage of this is a form sitting and behaving like any other form on your site but with the data being held where you want it and not sitting separately on the website.

City Transport and Traffic Innovation for Akabo Media

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RECSO Envirospill for BME Global

European Association for Haematopathology 2018 for MCI Dublin

Science of Exposure Assessment 2018 for the International Occupational Hygiene Association

European Gas Conference for the WRA

Investing in Africa and African Investments for Africa Events

BTS Conference for Tunnelling Journal

European Gas Conference for Clarion 
Alternative Events’ Alternative In House Tech
NextGen Scada for Phoenix Forum
Tandem Events’ Gamification Europe
x2018 for the British Occupational Hygeine Society
Gulf Information Security Exhibition and Conference for Dubai World Trade Center
Surfex for Step Exhibitions
Africa Investments Home Site
The Energyst Event
The Internet of Things Expo  for Dubai World Trade Center
Ask the Experts Conference for the WRA
New site for The House a co working space for creatives in Tunbridge Wells

A long standing client wanted to revitalise their event branding with an Asian twist

About Akabo Media

Akabo Media provides decision makers within the fields of logistics, supply chain and intelligent transportation systems with the informed intelligence they need to stay one step ahead. Their on- and off-line publications give readers the latest news, expert commentary and feature articles delivered in a format and at a time that suits them. Their events offer the opportunity to share best practice and build networks with some of the world’s leading figures in their industries. As a platform for third party exposure, they offer opportunities covering advertising, sponsorship, event co-hosting, directory listings, data usage and more.

What Challenges did they face?

Akabo were keen to re-brand their Asia Logistics & Supply 2017 event without having to redesign the website, which was originally built using our Byzantium Event and Conference Theme pre-formatted templates. Akabo wanted to excite their audience by focusing on the location, Singapore, and were therefore keen to inject an Asian flavour to the event branding. Colourful and fresh with an emphasis on location instead of sector specific needed to be the pull factor.

How did we help?
Taking inspiration from Asia, in particular popular attractions in Singapore, we created an event logo identity that represented the energy and excitement of the city.

What were the results?

Deliverables included the supply of variable logo treatments and respective file formats for both print and digital applications. An event leaflet was also created and supplied ready for print and online distribution. The event website was created using our Byzantium pre-formatted, templated home and inner page layouts ready for Akabo to create their content and load into the system.

Need help with your branding requirements? 

Contact us

What to consider when selecting an editorial theme (and why ours ticks the boxes)

When launching an editorial site for a magazine or news, choosing the right theme is important. Whether your site is undergoing a re-design or being created from scratch, when it comes to picking a theme, here are the key points to look out for.

We’ve recently launched a magazine theme for Middle East Business Intelligence (MEED). This was a bespoke project but we were so excited by how it meets all the requirements for an editorial theme, that we’ve decided to roll it out as a set theme, similar to Byzantium. This means that you can manage your own content and visuals within an easy to manage system.

Remember to be Responsive

The majority of news is consumed via a mobile device these days via websites or mobile apps. Although some news sites have their own apps, results are mixed on how much they are used versus news websites, Much of this depends on where users are sourcing their news, as often links and updates are shared via email and social media, and then clicked through. Plus many businesses don’t need the additional cost of a specific app.

Therefore your editorial site needs to be responsive to mobile users on phones and tablets. This means an easy to navigate site, sensible use of images to avoid overloading data and wifi when people are on the move, and clearly sign posted content. At Miramedia we build ALL our sites to be mobile responsive as a matter of course. If you want to know more about mobile responsiveness, read our thoughts here.

Look for a clean uncluttered design

For editorial, it helps to look ‘serious’. Clean lines, unfussy font, slightly more conservative colours and tones. A clean, uncluttered design means that the volume of text and information doesn’t appear overwhelming, and can help with users navigating the site. As mentioned above, if navigating on a mobile device, this ease of navigation becomes even more important.

The theme we created for MEED has a balance of engaging content and white space, with colour used to good effect to highlight which industry the user is in. As a different colour is used per sector, it is easy to depict category specific articles within the larger site which aids navigation to relevant content

Showcase main stories with images

Most newspaper sites avoid too many images and only showcase the leading articles with visuals. On magazine sites, you have a bit more leeway to use images to draw more readers into the lead articles and direct their attention. Images can be used to tell a story as much as words and an eye catching visual in the right place can be used to drive traffic to the main articles.

In our editorial theme, we include images for all the main stories on the home page and sub pages, which gives you great flexibility to direct your readers’ attention to the articles you want to promote.

Make it easy to navigate to avoid Info Overload

It can be easy for editorial sites to look very overloaded with too much information, graphics, videos and banner ads all competing for your attention. Where do I go first?! So it’s crucial to make it easy to navigate your site.

Our MEED site has a two tiered top menu bar which allows you to easily find the industry section you’re looking for. In addition, we put related content next to the lead stories so users can move onto additional stories that interest them.

Grid Layouts Work Best

The grid layout is famous in news and magazine site design and for good reason. It follows the rules above for a clean, uncluttered look and is easy to navigate. It also allows editors to manage and organise content easily. In addition, as well as looking good, it ‘looks like a newspaper’ so carries the feeling of reading print onto the screen.

The MEED site is built using a traditional three column grid layout which is popular with many other news sites, from newspapers to magazines. This familiarity makes it easy for the user to consume as well as for editors to manage.

Want to learn more about our editorial theme? Then please get in touch here

WordPress and the mira.cx platform has great automatic tools for resizing images. So uploading a speaker image for example will automatically create various image sizes for different purposes. However we recommend you only upload image sizes that you need on the site – rather than uploading very large files. You rarely need large images (e.g. 3M) on the web. The advantages of minimising file size before uploading are:

• Speed of upload for administrators
• Reduction of disk space used
• More usable “large” image size

As professional designers, we tend to use Adobe Photoshop.

However not everyone has access to Photoshop software let alone being confident in successfully utilising it. Taking this into consideration we have tried and tested an online image resizer and compressor which makes editing imagery for web and social media a doddle.

The free online image resizer and compressor gives you scope to crop and resize any image to the exact pixels or proportion you specified and reduce the file size significantly without losing quality. And its FREE.

We took the high quality image with a specification of 5472 x 3648px at 300dpi. File size at outset = 15.4MB. Our intention was to prepare the image for use as a full width hero image on a website as a working example.

• The first action after uploading the image was to set the desired crop of the image suitable for its intended application. For the intended application the image would be best viewed in a horizontal format across the full width of the page. Using the click and drag option it was easy to select the area of the image and CROP accordingly.
  
  
• Next step, Utilising action 4 ‘Resize your image’ to reduce the image width down to 2000px. The maximum width needed to display on a widescreen desktop display. By keeping the aspect ratio selected, the image depth auto adjusted in pro with the width adjustment.
  

• The final step was to optimise the image. We used a normal compression as follows;
  Not forgetting to select RESIZE IMAGE to apply all the actions.

• The final outcome cropped, resized and compressed the image. Reducing the overall image file size from 15.4MB down to 465.4KB
  

• Additional options included image rotate, image background options for example transparent setting etc and output file format such as JPEG, PNG etc.
  Our Final Image quality was uncompromised and best suited for web.