How the Daily Mail’s IT revamp made it an online market leader

The Daily Mail has seen a significant increase in traffic since implementing CRX

The Daily Mail’s digital division has introduced new technology that it credits for taking it from the number three ranked news provider in the UK’s online news market to number one.

Associated Northcliffe Digital (AND), the digital consumer division of Daily Mail and General Trust (DMGT), replaced its relational database with a Java Content Repository JCR model using Day Software’s CRX solution.

The man who implemented the changes, Mail Online CTO Shaun Perkinson, spoke exclusively to Computing to explain how the division implemented the technology.

Perkinson said that the changes began in mid-2008 with the launch of the sixth generation of the Mail Online web site. The editor of the web site was used to a daily newspaper environment where he could work on an issue, put it to bed, and start the next day with a clean slate. However, online content proved to be more complicated largely because of the company's clunky content management system.

Until then, the web site had been based on a J2EE application architecture that required extensive IT investment for every change to the site, which meant it took too long to implement new initiatives.

This prompted Perkinson to review the existing architecture, which he had been closely involved in developing when the web site first launched, and identify the challenges that needed to be addressed to take the online process to the next stage.

“We wanted to make the online process more like the newspaper environment, and get content to readers more rapidly,” he said.

The team began to create a revamped content management system (CMS), which allowed editorial staff to lay out articles, crop images, and place text and images wherever they wanted. The system had many of the same properties as Quark, a desktop publishing system used widely by newspapers for their print issues.

However, there was still a problem when it came to physically posting the content online; all content needed to be put into a complicated system before it was displayed on the web page.

Perkinson deemed this wasteful because all the hard work had already been done; the page had already been built in the CMS. The CTO decided to look at Apache Jackrabbit, an open source content repository for the Java platform.

“The thing that attracted us to Jackrabbit was that it potentially solved something specific to our case and let us leverage what we had already done in the CMS,” explained Perkinson.

Upon looking into Jackrabbit, he found a solution that was available from Day Software: the Day CRX Enterprise Content Repository, a version of the Apache Jackrabbit and Sling open source projects.

The company began running its explore.dailymail.co.uk and Metro.co.uk web sites using the JCR model with its CRX solution.

Both web sites have seen significant increases in web traffic and page views. For example, the explore.dailymail.co.uk site has seen web traffic increase from 25 million to 32 million unique visitors per month.

Climbing the Google rankings

In addition to creating a CMS system and implementing the CRX solution, Perkinson also created a search engine optimisation (SEO) application to help articles to climb search engine news rankings.

He explained there were subtleties in the structure of the new SEO application that improved the content’s accessibility and made it easy for search engines to trawl.

The search engine optimisation allowed readers to identify areas in which Mail Online’s content trumped that of competitors, according to Perkinson.

“We are an authority on certain topics and readers could search online and find our articles and understand that we had the best content.

“Where we had news stories that were top of news search results, we found that people would come back again and again to continue reading stories on that topic,” he said.

Moving forward

Perkinson revealed that the Metro web site, which has had a complete revamp, and explore.dailymail.co.uk had already been migrated to the CRX solution.

AND intends to migrate all of its web sites to the solution, starting with its This Is Money web site and eventually the main Daily Mail web site.

However, the CTO is not resting on his laurels, and revealed that the next stage of planning for the Daily Mail’s online content involves catering to iPhone and iPad users.

“iPhone and iPad applications are big on the Daily Mail roadmap,” he said.

He said that when it comes to such digital platforms, people are prepared to pay for access to news, and he finds it “interesting” that people consider paying for specific content when they use iPhone or iPad applications.

He said that using CRX helps deliver content to these users and hinted that smartphones and tablet PCs could spur a demand in paid-for digital news content.

“One of the main reasons we’re so aggressively adopting CRX is because we understand we need an API layer above the content to allow us to use the content in interesting ways."