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To elevate their position as a leader in communications within the Christian community, Premier Christian News needed a new website to launch one of their brands to a new level.

Premier has come a long way in the past 25 years, from a small London-based radio station to a multi-media organisation with more than one million weekly listeners. The Premier brands span 3 DAB radio stations, magazines, interactive websites, in-person and online events and last but not least, on-demand video and audio content.

A screenshot of a news website showing a headline about Kanye West discussing his life transformation through Jesus. The page also features other news stories and images.
A screenshot of a news website displaying various articles, including one about an MP calling for churches to open on Easter Sunday. The layout is divided into sections with headlines, images, and text snippets.
A smartphone displays a news website with a headline about how Jesus has transformed an individual's life. The top stories section is also visible.

The Challenge

As part of their expansion — and increased demand — the organisation felt that Premier Christian News needed to stand alone as its own brand. This, in turn, meant the need for a new website dedicated to the Christian news outlet.

Their ambition was to become the leading Christian news site in the UK, so they enlisted the WebBox team to deliver the project. Our mission was to design and develop a news-based website using a bespoke design and user-friendly content management system (CMS) that would meet the news media’s fast-paced requirements to keep people engaged and informed.

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The Solution

Our team worked in partnership with Premier to fully grasp their mission, vision, values and brand guidelines — so that we could consider these aspects and make them an integral part of the design and development process.

Centred around Premier’s short and long term objectives, the new Premier Christian News website reflects their branding guidelines, allows their users to engage with the organisation, has a seamless user experience, and is compatible across all device types. With user experience (UX) at the heart of the design, the new website is quick to load, intuitive to navigate and interactive, with content that’s easy to access, share, and engage with.

To ensure that they really had a next-level connection with their audience, they also wanted to personalise the experience. To do so, we integrated Personyze (an app that uses AI to provide relevant experiences that drive engagement and conversions). This technology allows the site to serve relevant news content and articles to individual users based on the previous articles they’ve read and topics they’ve searched for or engaged with — giving people a reason to come back.

We also integrated a range of analytical tools that allow Premier to customise the user experience in line with the data and insights they receive. This also provides editors with a dashboard so they can see at a glance which articles are gaining traction in real-time.

Of course, to lead in this sector, you need to also factor in growth. With this in mind, we made the front end of the site fully multilingual ready so that Premier has the functionality in place to expand to a wider audience.

Additionally, to ensure that staff could keep up with the fast-paced world of 24-hour news, the site’s content management system needed to be easy to use, something we had in mind when creating their CMS. We later provided on-site CMS training in London to ensure the editors were comfortable with the process and workflow.

The CMS also gives news authors access to a variety of templates to suit each individual article (such as video templates, text-only based templates, banner-focused templates and infographics). Contributors also have the ability to create both infographics and interactive timelines via the CMS, with an additional approval step required before their content is published.

What’s next

We continue to support and maintain the website regularly, and as Premier Christian News grows, we will be developing new features. Excitingly, this year sees the website expand into the US market.

Furthermore, we are also managing all of Premier’s paid ads across Google, Meta (Facebook and Instagram), and Programmatic for the entire group of organisations.

Colleagues discussing work

Premier appointed WebBox to undertake the design, development and support of our new website; Premier News. WebBox were agile and consultative in their approach and delivered the website which exceeded our aims and objectives. The website has attracted over 460,000 unique users in the first 3 full months of launching the new website and this continues to increase month by month. We have also experienced very quick post-project support which has helped us evolve the website further as we learn from the data that we gather from our users and tracking tools. We continue to work with WebBox to host and support the website, and we look forward to working with them on future projects.

Rufus Olaniyan, Head of Digital & Technology, Premier

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