Miranj Creates a Scalable Web Presence for Guiding Tech

The Client

Guiding Tech is an online publisher of guides that helps audiences discover, understand and troubleshoot everyday technology.

From WordPress Blog to High-Performing Site

Guiding Tech started as a WordPress blog offering technology tips and guides. However, the technology boom in the last decade meant that Guiding Tech outgrew this and needed a more robust, scalable web-presence that would support increased traffic.

The project kicked off with a hands-on workshop to understand the client’s challenges and aspirations. Based on learnings, Miranj drafted a new information architecture, re-modelled existing content and laid the foundations for future formats.

They also moved Guiding Tech to a modern, content-first CMS called Craft. Miranj highly recommends Craft, which is an un-opinionated CMS that frees content from presentation ensuring design flexibility and content interoperability.

Miranj approached the design by stripping it down to the bare essential – the article text – and proceeded content-out. They abstracted common patterns and created re-usable blocks for byte-sized content, rich cross-links and internal promotions. The site has evolved into a robust design system on top of a flexible underlying wireframe that supports a variety of content formats, experimental ad-slots and more. 

The Result

The project was executed over multiple phases tackling opportunities in design, author experience, technology and business intelligence. Today Guiding Tech has a globally distributed team, publishes dozens of articles each day and serves millions of unique visitors each month.

We realised that a website’s content authoring experience (AX) is as critical as the end-user experience (UX). We saw first hand the out-sized impact of micro optimisations such as reducing a click, or simplifying and merging two input fields into one, when deployed at scale. We learned how to design for high-intent users — people who are after very specific information — and how to cross promote relevant content with minimal disruption to the reader. We gained technical expertise in handling a few hundred requests per second.

The Miranj Team

One Big Thing

Designing a scalable, resilient publishing platform is not just about the reader experience. It’s just as important to be thinking about the needs of authors who spend hours creating the content, and enabling the publisher to take data-backed monetisation decisions for a healthy, sustainable business.