Indebuurt has been declared the winner of both “Best Website News” and “Most Popular Website News”!
De Persgroep started setting up Indebuurt a number of years ago. Everything you want to know about food & drinks, outings, living and shopping in your city can be found on this platform. In addition to the news, Indebuurt also contains a business directory with a nice overview of all facilities and service providers in the area. Think of the hairdresser, the bookstore and nice restaurants. Content automatically flows to other regional websites of De Persgroep. In addition, the most popular articles from Indebuurt are also forwarded to AD.nl. Local news with a huge reach!
Hyperlocal
Indebuurt is built in WordPress. After a lengthy period of looking internally at what would and would not fit into the platform, it was time to significantly shorten the lead time of new functionality. The desire for an actively involved partner grew because De Persgroep decided as a publisher to focus more and more on 'hyperlocal', news that could not be closer to you. Directly from your street, for example!
The three city sites for Delft, Utrecht and Dordrecht already existed and at the end of 2016 a plan was made to expand significantly in 2017 to dozens of cities. Indebuurt now has more than 40+ cities.
Rolling out new cities was complicated, took a long time and was expensive. That had to be different.
Towards a scalable and flexible platform with wide reach
Van Ons takes over management of the platform towards the end of 2016. The focus of the work was on completely rebuilding the back-end and front-end to establish a scalable platform. Extensive discussions took place regarding the functionalities to be included in the platform, and the front- and back-ends were fully mapped out in advance. We examined which existing elements of the platform could be reused and which needed to be developed from scratch. In this way, we extracted the good parts from the existing platform and supplemented them with rebuilt components. This reduces costs and yields significant time savings.
Going live, further rollout and further development
The new Indebuurt platform was put into use at the beginning of March 2017 and has been further developed since then. In 2020 we started converting the platform to the new WordPress environment. In addition, a complete redesign has been done.
By making smart choices regarding hosting and technology, the new cities can be rolled out in a reasonably short time, and the editorial team is quickly up and running to publish content. Not only are new cities rolled out on a regular basis, but the platform itself is also continuously evolving. De Persgroep has chosen to collaborate with Van Ons in which work on the technology and design is carried out for a number of days on a weekly basis. In this way, Indebuurt ensures a continuous process of innovation, expansion, and improvement of the platform.
By working on the platform on a weekly basis, De Persgroep ensures continuous innovation, improvement and expansion of the Indebuurt platform.
Indebuurt consists of 40 editorial offices. They all work on their own website. Even though there are 40 different editorial offices, it can be managed from 1 panel and they therefore have global management. This way, the product owner can create new categories and implement them on all websites.
For the editors, we have made the standard role structure of WordPress completely suitable for the editorial offices of the relevant cities. We have made great integrations with Aagje, the “smart database” of De Persgroep, which brings together all kinds of user data that can be used to make powerful analyses. And the vacancies posted on Indebuurt can easily be linked to a company in the business directory so that the profile of the companies in question is always supplemented with the current vacancies they have open.
Measure everything with Google Tag Manager
The Indebuurt platform also has extensive integration with Google Tag Manager. Apart from the “simple” tracking of CTAs, outbound clicks, inbound clicks and clicks on social media items, things that are more difficult to capture are also measured. For example, whether a block with company information has been featured in a sponsored article or when more messages are loaded on the homepage. By closely monitoring this information, the website is continuously optimized to provide a good user experience.