Overview
Inside Survivor is a one-stop shop for fans of the reality TV show Survivor. A blog website dedicated to providing fans of the programme with up-to-date news, interviews, spoilers and more.
I was approached by Inside Survivor to refresh the brand identity, as well as redesigning and developing the WordPress website to optimise performance due to high traffic.
Problems
- Logo needs to be modernised
- Performance is impacted by high traffic
- Ad revenue does not reflect traffic
Solution
- Design new logo while staying true to the original identity
- Offload uploads to CDN and introduce caching
- Mediavine partnership and full redesign of website to cater for better ad placement
Reflections
The new logo I introduced helped modernise the brand, while clearly deriving from the original identity to keep familiarity with the already established user base. I created a logomark that was easily identifiable in a variety of contexts such as avatars for social channels and stickers.
Redesigning the website was an important step in maximising the potential value of the high traffic seen daily. With a mobile first approach, I introduced simple and concise modular sections, allowing for clearly defined ad space in between. Inside Survivor has since seen a huge increase in revenue and has further built upon its popularity.
With the site regularly attracting upwards of 150,000 pageviews a month, it was imperative that it ran efficiently. I took some essential steps to address this, including moving the site to Cloudflare, creating a Digital Ocean Space to serve bulky media uploads and utilising caching plugin WPRocket to compress files and lazy load images. Inside Survivor now scores very highly in lighthouse and user engagement has increased as a result.