Narrative Entertainment
The Brief
Hawkmedia approached weheartdigital to help with a time-critical technical migration on behalf of Narrative Entertainment. Narrative Entertainment had recently acquired Sony Pictures Television entire UK channels portfolio and with the sale came the rights to the web Content for Sony Action & Classic Movies as well as popular kids channels Pop Fun and Tiny Pop. The platforms upon which these sites were based were due to be switched off within 6 months, this was a hard deadline after which, the sites on the Sony platform were due to be switched off.
The Solution
The existing sites were built on an internally developed CMS platform that was due to be retired. With no rights to the website code itself our task was to re-create the front-end websites, obtain and migrate the data and ensure that existing 3rd party integrations remained intact and worked on the new platform. In addition the scheduling service was having to be developed anew on the same timescale and so we needed to develop the scheduling functionality against a moving target with a data structure that was still being defined. This involved building an AWS based data ingress and enrichment process to supply schedule information to the website and app users. Our challenge was to complete the migration and launch the new sites without any disruption to users of the service. In addition we were given the additional challenge of making improvements to the UX of the kids’s sites along the way. From the start our approach was to mitigate risk to ensure that as much as possible was in our control. Our first step was to set-up a Drupal environment and get a copy of the existing sites set up so that we had a copy of the data secured for future reference. We then developed export scripts for all the different content types required for the new website whilst the new site templates (based on WordPress) sites were being developed. To minimise risk to the overall project we split the project into 3 launches, GREAT! Followed by Tinypop and then Popfun. We then brought forward the release of GREAT!, delivering this site early ensured that we had been through the full development-test-deploy cycle well in advance of the deadline which ensured that the launch of the other two sites happened more smoothly. The kids sites in particular are high traffic and so ensuring stability of the platforms was imperative. Our Technical Lead/Dev Ops, architected and configured the AWS hosting environment to meet the customer requirements. Security was also of utmost importance, the site was pentested and had a 3rd party audit to ensure it met required standards.
The Outcome
All three websites were migrated successfully within the deadline and to budget. We ensured that end users had no disruption to the service and that the Narrative content team had a site that was easy to maintain. Post-launch we continue to manage the AWS environment to keep the platform performing, optimised and secure and we continue to work with the Narrative team to produce new features across all of the sites.
Overview
Hawkmedia approached weheartdigital to help with a time-critical technical migration on behalf of Narrative Entertainment. Narrative Entertainment had recently acquired Sony Pictures Television entire UK channels portfolio and with the sale came the rights to the web Content for Sony Action & Classic Movies as well as popular kids channels Pop Fun and Tiny Pop. The platforms upon which these sites were based were due to be switched off within 6 months, this was a hard deadline after which, the sites on the Sony platform were due to be switched off.
Team Thoughts
