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News website development

For editors and publishers of local, regional and national news titles who need a platform designed around the desk, the deadline and the archive rather than a blogging tool stretched to breaking point.

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The problem

What goes wrong today

Where it usually starts

A working newsroom moves faster than most content systems were built for.

  • A reporter files a court story from a phone at half past four; the sub-editor rewrites the intro and cuts it to length; the section editor wants it up before the rival title and wants the regional edition to carry a different headline.
  • In a general-purpose CMS that is three people fighting over one edit screen, with the last save winning and nobody able to see what the sub changed.
  • Scheduled stories go out with the wrong byline because the scheduling field was buried.
  • A correction is made silently, so readers who shared the original never learn it was wrong.

Where it gets harder

Then there is the archive.

  • Twenty years of stories sit on old URLs that still earn traffic from search and social links, and every platform move so far has lost a slice of them.
  • Advert positions are hard-coded into templates, so the advertising manager asks a developer every time a campaign changes.
  • On a big news day the site slows down exactly when readers arrive, because every page is being rebuilt on every request.
  • The editorial team ends up working around the software instead of through it.

Scope of the service

What the build covers

A custom news build normally covers the full editorial chain. The desk queue moves a story through pitched, assigned, filed, subbed and published, with permissions per section so a sports sub cannot publish to the front page. Article revisions keep a diff and a restore point for every save. Scheduling and embargo decide when a piece goes live, and regional or section editions let the same story carry different headlines, pictures and placement. Media processing produces responsive image sets with focal points, captions and credits. Corrections and updates are logged on the article itself. Breaking-news banners carry an expiry so they do not linger, and a live-blog block handles timestamped updates during a running story.

Underneath, the platform ships full-page caching with a per-article purge, a news sitemap and RSS or Atom feeds, advert positions defined per template with house-ad fallback, and related-content rules the editors can tune. Old-URL migration imports your redirect map so archive links keep resolving. Paywall or metered access is an option when your model needs it, and press-agency feed intake can be configured against the agencies you already subscribe to.

Deliberately out of scope

  • Print pagination and layout, which stays in your print system with an archive link from the site
  • Ad sales and billing, which stay in your ad server and finance tools
  • Analytics beyond what the platform records, which stays in your analytics provider

When the scope grows

Scoping scenario

A regional group with four titles wants one newsroom queue, separate front pages per title, shared reporters who file to any title, and a single archive migration covering three different legacy systems. That is a materially different build from a single-title weekly with two staff, and the scope document names which parts of each are in play.

Deliverables

What you receive

  • Discovery notes from sitting with the desk through a publishing day
  • A written scope document naming each stage of the desk workflow and what is left out
  • Designs of the article template, the desk queue and the front-page editor on phone and desktop
  • The build, including caching, feeds, sitemap and advert positions, deployed to your hosting or ours
  • Archive migration with a redirect map tested against your old URLs
  • Training for reporters, subs, section editors and the advertising manager
  • Handover material and full ownership of the source code and your content

Process

How a project runs

Each stage maps onto the project view in your client panel. Durations are set in your proposal, never on this page.

  1. Onboarding

    Access to your current CMS, archive export, ad server and analytics; introductions to the editors who will test the build.

    Project stage: Onboarding

  2. Planning

    Discovery with the chief editor, a section editor and a sub; the desk stages, editions and migration volume are written into the scope document.

    Project stage: Planning

  3. Design

    Article, front page, section and live-blog templates designed first for the phone, with the advert positions marked in.

    Project stage: Design

  4. Development

    Built in layers: editorial roles and revisions, then scheduling and editions, then caching, feeds and advert slots, then migration.

    Project stage: Development

  5. Client review

    The newsroom runs a parallel publishing week on the new system and reports where the desk flow does not match reality.

    Project stage: Client review

  6. Revisions

    Changes from the review are made and re-checked against the scope document and the redirect map.

    Project stage: Revisions

  7. Ready for launch

    Final archive import, redirect verification, cache warm-up and the launch checklist signed off by the editor.

    Project stage: Ready for launch

  8. Delivered

    The title publishes on the new platform; hosting and maintenance continue under their own agreement if taken.

    Project stage: Delivered

Integrations

Commonly integrated

Systems this kind of business usually asks us to connect. Each integration is confirmed during discovery; none is assumed.

  • Ad servers for position-level campaign delivery
  • Press-agency feeds for wire copy intake
  • Newsletter and email platforms for daily bulletins
  • Subscription and payment providers for paywalls or metered access
  • Analytics and consent management platforms
  • Image libraries and picture-agency feeds
  • Social publishing tools for distribution

How we would approach it

Worked example

Concept demo

A regional group with four titles and one desk

The situation

A regional publisher with four weekly titles and a shared pool of reporters wanted a single desk queue where any reporter could file to any title, while each title kept its own front page, its own section editors and its own advert positions.

Why it is a custom build

The custom route is needed because the group's shared-reporter model cuts across the one-site-one-team assumption that most publishing systems make, and because the migration involves three different source schemas.

The scope we would propose

  • One editorial platform with per-title permissions and editions
  • A story model that can be placed on more than one title with its own headline per placement, advert slots defined per title template
  • A migration plan covering the three legacy systems the titles currently sit on, with one consolidated redirect map

Concept demo: a scoping scenario written to show how we would approach the work. It is not a delivered client project.

Pricing

What affects the price

Every proposal is priced on scope. These are the factors that move it most for this kind of build.

  • Number of titles, editions and front pages
  • Size of the editorial team and how fine-grained section permissions need to be
  • Live blog, breaking-news and press-agency intake requirements
  • Paywall or metered access and the subscription provider involved
  • Archive volume, number of legacy systems and the state of the old URLs
  • Advert positions per template and the ad server to connect
  • Custom editorial reporting, such as stories per desk or corrections per section
  • Hosting choice and expected traffic peaks on major news days

Start from a package

News publishing package

A newsroom desk, scheduled publishing, editions, corrections log, feeds and advert positions for news titles that publish daily.

Custom build
View the package

FAQ

Frequently asked questions

How do you decide between a custom newsroom build and the package?

In discovery we compare how your desk actually runs with what the news publishing package covers through configuration. A single title with one desk and standard advert positions is often a package fit. Shared reporters across titles, unusual edition rules or a multi-system archive migration usually point to the custom route, and we say which plainly.

Can you migrate our archive and keep the old links working?

Usually yes. We export the archive, map stories, authors, sections and images into the new model, and import a redirect map so old URLs resolve to the new ones. The scope document states what the source data does and does not allow once we have seen an export.

Does the site stay fast on a big news day?

The platform serves full pages from cache and purges only the articles that change, so a surge of readers hits cached pages rather than the database. Expected peaks are part of the hosting discussion, and we test the cache behaviour before launch.

Can we run a paywall later rather than at launch?

Yes. Metered or subscriber-only access is a scoped option built on the membership engine, and it can be added after launch without changing the editorial side.

Who owns the platform and the content?

You do. Source code and all content, images and the redirect map are handed over at delivery. Hosting and maintenance are optional and separately agreed.

Get a project quote for news website software

Answer a few questions about your business, your current systems and what should change. We reply with a clear, competitive proposal.

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