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Magazine Expands to New & Improved Online Platform

As a fellow Rome business, we’re big fans of V3. They took care of our staff photos and we love following all their other work. You might recognize V3’s name from any of their three publications: Grand, a quarterly publication for the 60+ population in Rome, the Wedding Compendium, an annual magazine released every summer for people planning their own weddings, and V3 Magazine, a monthly lifestyle publication spotlighting businesses and feature stories from Rome and across northwest Georgia.

Challenges

While they have the physical publications down to a science, V3 was struggling with how their magazines were distributed online. V3 uses Issuu, a magazine hosting site, to show full, well, issues of their publications. However, there was no way to share specific articles or photos. For staff members, this made it hard to share content they helped create. For businesses or people featured, they couldn’t show off articles about their story. V3 also saw a huge advantage in creating a new online platform: an entirely new revenue source to accompany content that was already completed. Thus, the idea for ReadV3 was born.

The team at V3 knew exactly what they wanted, but didn’t have the time or all the resources they needed to make their vision a reality. So, they called on Romega to help, and we were excited to take on the opportunity!

If you have a specific vision for a website in mind, but don’t know how to turn it into a reality, let’s meet up and talk it out! We’d love to help your business grow in an online space.

Solutions

A few great things about working with V3 were the staff’s creative minds. On the design side, they knew exactly how they wanted the website to look, and when we built each of the website views, they were able to give specific and actionable feedback. As for the content, it’s really easy to create a beautiful website for a magazine that already has incredible photography and beautifully crafted stories.

This website has so many features and details that it’s hard to cover them all. So, we’ve broken down this project into seven sections: Advertising, Responsive Design, Search, Flexible Layouts, Issues, Header Alert, and some Fun Details.

Advertising

As with any publisher, V3 needed the ability to insert advertising onto various site pages and articles. However, they wanted them to look great and feel like an organic part of the page. Romega standardized a particular size and orientation and used that throughout the site. V3 can assign different ads to different spaces on the site, giving them flexibility in how they market their advertising. Plus, they can track how many times each ad is viewed and clicked from within their website dashboard.

Responsive design

All the websites we build use responsive design techniques to scale according to the size of the screen. This was especially critical for V3, who envisioned a very specific layout on mobile versus desktop. Each layout was designed with that viewing platform in mind. The navigation menu for mobile and desktop uses what’s called the “priority plus” pattern. This type of menu shows as many navigation items as will fit, with a “hamburger” icon to open a drop-down of the rest of the links. On mobile, the nav menu is hidden by default. Selecting the hamburger icon slides it open.

Search

With years of articles on the site, Romega and V3 wanted to make it easy to find any specific article. So, the site search is more than a simple text input. Based on your search term, the menu dropdown immediately shows a handful of results. You can always click ‘More results’ if there are too many results that match your term.

Flexible layouts

V3 is known for its great photography, so articles needed to spotlight those photos in many ways. The site allows V3 editors to build each article layout to include galleries, slideshows, pull quotes and more, with a general overall style but no set “cookie-cutter” structure. So each article feels different and is laid out to maximize the impact of photos and story.

Issues

Sometimes you may want to see all the articles from a particular issue, rather than browsing through topics. You can click on “Issues” in the nav menu to see an archive of past issues. Click on the issue cover or “view articles” link to see all the articles from that issue grouped on Read V3. Or if you want to see the print version of the issue, click the “full issue” link instead.

alert/notice

V3 editors wanted a way to alert readers of special sections or point them to topical content. So, we built an alert bar that they can display at the top of the site. This highly-customizable alert lets them specify a background color, text, and an optional image. They can choose whether to display it on just the home page or sitewide. If it shouldn’t display on a particular page or article, they can easily choose to hide it on that piece of content. Once they’re done, V3 can hide the alert until next time.

It’s all in the Details

There are a few fun features that we included to make the site delightful to use and read.

  • A progress bar at the top of the screen lets you know much of an article you’ve read.
  • Once you scroll a bit down a page, an arrow appears on the bottom right corner of your screen that, once clicked, will pop you back up to the top
  • When viewing a category archive, you can click “load more” instead of having to navigate through multiple pages of results
  • On large cell phones like the iPhone X, the latest issue image can be seen in the navigation menu

The Results

“We love how ReadV3 turned out. Sarah did a great job at incorporating all the things we needed on the site. We had a very specific vision and Romega was able to execute it as we pictured. Now, using the content we already have, we have an entirely new source of revenue that will open more doors for V3. We look forward to working with Romega Digital in the future!”

Chris Forino
Ad Sales + Client Relations
V3 Publications

Now that the site is up and running, V3 has a whole new platform to show off their beautifully crafted articles. It was great to work with a Rome-centric business, especially one that emphasizes beautiful storytelling. To check out some of their articles, visit their brand new website!