National Public Radio

As one of the leading media outlets in the country, National Public Radio (NPR) is a well-respected brand operating in a highly competitive medium.

While NPR audiences remain strong, overall radio audiences are in decline with more and more listeners turning to the web for news and entertainment. With these trends in mind, NPR has made a significant investment in the web with the key goal of retaining (even growing) share by repurposing radio content for the web. This online initiative had four major components: design, content management system (CMS), web development, application programming interface (API) development and mobile.

NPR had begun the design process prior to engaging Siteworx, but found there was more to do, especially in regards to the agile methodology that was being adopted for the project. With a constricted launch timeline–just four months–Siteworx was able to provide a dedicated team with diverse, highly-specialized design and development talents to assist NPR in meeting their aggressive goals.

While NPR wanted to re-fresh their design, they also wanted to improve navigation and “findability,” particularly by highlighting NPR’s extensive audio assets, as well as its video and flash presentations. Critical to the redesign was finding a solution that would make NPR’s audio content web-friendly, especially through search. This would make on-air references to web content much more seamless and user-friendly.

Another desire of NPR’s was to optimize the production website’s back-end source code and bring it in-line with the Model View Controller (MVC) software pattern, an architectural pattern used in software engineering. Not only did this help with creating more reusable code, but it also reduced the time it takes for developers to understand and become productive on the NPR codebase. Siteworx team members worked with NPR architects to make this happen in lock-step with the other development efforts.

Front-End Development Team

Siteworx has a proven track record of standards-based XHTML and CSS development for performance, compliance, and SEO purposes. Because this project followed an agile methodology, changes were constantly being made and required continual updates of front-end code, which in turn required continuous sample testing across browsers. Due to these constant changes in front-end code, there was a greater risk to losing browser compatibility.  To mitigate these aforementioned risks, NPR relied heavily on Siteworx to proactively manage browser compatibility issues.

NPR employed Siteworx’ traditional quality assurance (QA) resources as well as development QA resources. The development resources created a number of unit tests, especially around database changes, as well as implementing the Selenium web application testing system for automated browser testing. 

CMS Development

Due to Siteworx’ extensive experience with commercial, open source, and custom CMS products, Siteworx helped NPR redevelop its proprietary CMS. It was to be a hybrid PHP/Java product utilizing jQuery for AJAX enablement of rich interfaces for content managers. Following agile methodologies, Siteworx paired a member of the CMS development team with a member of the user experience team. Through this collaboration, the pair accomplished a tremendous amount of work in a few months. Furthermore, the collaboration allowed for the addition of new features that users had been requesting for years.

NPR also looked to maintain blog content with their in-house proprietary CMS. Without this enhancement, NPR would have been extremely limited in how blog postings could be displayed throughout their website. In order to resolve this issue, Siteworx helped create a layer that allows interaction between NPR’s CMS and their third party blog software.

Agile Process, Tools and Support

NPR was also interested in improving their development and issue management processes through the use of the latest web-based development tools. This need for improvement led NPR to the Atlassian product suite, which, in turn, led them to Siteworx as an implementation partner.

Siteworx provided consultants experienced in the Atlassian tool suite who could help NPR with agile development, deployment, and issue tracking. Prior to the engagement, the NPR development team used CVS, an open source version control system for their development and, while it worked, it involved a number of challenges. Siteworx recommended that NPR migrate to Subversion as a VCS and use it in tandem with the Atlassian tools (with which it is integrated). NPR saw this recommendation as superior and utilized Siteworx expertise in making the transition. The transition was such a success that Subversion is now used by non-developers to track design artifacts and versions. Siteworx also implemented Atlassian’s Fisheye (an open source code repository) and Crucible (a peer code review tool), which allowed NPR to abandon pen and paper code reviews.

Digital Asset Management (DAM) Upgrade

Thousands of Rich Media Assets: Archived and Accessible Organization-Wide

NPR’s day-to-day operations generate thousands of audio files and transcripts each year. In 2010, this valuable and ever-increasing archive of rich digital media was hosted within a legacy archival system that was not meeting the organization’s needs. Specifically, the legacy system was very difficult to navigate. With complex interfaces that required various workarounds to find information, the simplest search required a librarian’s involvement. Siteworx was engaged as a consultant to lead the technical and user experience components of the project. Beyond the tactical success achieved, the ultimate benefit has been that NPR librarians can now spend time and resources more efficiently, providing value-added service to their internal clients. Staff can directly access a wealth of content, representing more than 40 years of our nation’s history that was previously only available by working through librarians.