Background
The Australian Police Journal (APJL) is an official publication for the various police forces within Australia. It was purchased under subscription.
Their website was dated and slow, and a nightmare to use – for both subscribers and the APJL team.
It was also super limited, and they were keen to open up some more features on the site.
Plus, considering the decline across physical publications globally, they wanted their website to give them some flexibility in future.
Strategy
There was no actual “brand” for the APJL, but since their entire business was a physical publication, we needed to develop a design that was consistent with it.
Their budget wasn’t high enough to cover all their features with a complete custom coded site, plus they wanted a CMS that would be easy to get support for if needed, so we made the decision to use WordPress for their site.
This also allowed us to take a modular approach to building, and add additional features as needed.
Solution
We designed a clean website that was inline with the existing APJL publication. We included a PDF flipbook service as well as the ability to post articles directly to the website. They can have issues of the publication be the flipbook, a list of articles, or both.
We included a self serve subscription service, allowing people to sign up directly on the website. As it was primarily for the police force and similar types of audience members, there was an approval process needed before access to the site was granted.
With the use of permissions and conditional displays, we implemented a system that allowed some articles to be free to read, whereas subscriber only content would ask people to log in to view.
We implemented an easy to use advertising system to open up additional revenue options beyond just subscriptions and magazine advertising.
As they had no way to communicate with customers digitally, we built in an email marketing platform that was managed via the website. New subscribers would automatically be added to the email database.
Post launch, we also added a podcast system and the ability to sell physical goods.
This all led to a powerful website that covered all of the needs of the APJL.
