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Mark Allen Group (MAG)
The Mark Allen Group (MAG) is a diverse range of companies involved in Medical & Healthcare and Education publishing. Each of these companies had websites for each journal, conference and event they held. Foresite has worked with MAG for over 3 years, initially involved with the highly successful online medical journal internurse.com. Internurse.com features MAG's flagship journals including British Journal of Nursing and British Journal of Community Nursing. In October 2003 MAG decided to overhaul all their websites, around 20, to achieve brand consistency, improve management of the sites and reduce costs. Foresite were invited to consult and develop a web infrastructure from which all MAG websites could be delivered.
Challenges
- MAG has around 20 medical and educational titles. Each title had its own website, developed independently of the each other and managed by different companies. The first challenge was to consolidate all technology used for the various websites. Different websites were built in different technology and hosted in different environments.
- MAG has a small in-house design team; Foresite had to work closely with them, not 'treading on their toes' but still achieving professional results.
- Develop a robust and scalable infrastructure from which all MAG journal websites could be managed. MAG has over 10,000 Medical and Healthcare articles alone and they need complete control in managing the journals published to the site and users accessing the articles.
- MAG wanted to allow users to purchase subscriptions for the paper copy of a journal, as well as online and institutional subscriptions. Users still needed to buy articles on a pay-per-article basis. This was quite a complex process and Foresite had to make the 'shopping process' as easy as possible.
- The end product for a user was downloading an article. This downloaded in the form of an HTML page. There were issues with poor printing, broken images and missing articles, Foresite were championed with improving the end product and giving MAG tools to easily update the library.
- MAG did not record or monitor website statistics on any of their sites, Foresite were asked to offer a solution that could display statistics for all the websites. This information would be used to develop revenue streams other than subscriptions so the website could fund itself.
- The internurse.com nursing journals are extremely popular amongst nurses and institutions; this was illustrated in April 2004 when the journals became part of the NHS National Core Content collection, available through SwetsWise Online Content.
Solutions
- Foresite recommended that all MAG websites should use the same technology and hosting platform. A dedicated server was purchased where all MAG websites are hosted.
- Foresite arranged monthly project meetings with all project managers from each journal. Along with the in-house design team a design framework was developed that all websites would adhere to. The structure of the relationship was such that Foresite oversaw the project management of the website development including managing the in-house design team.
- Foresite further developed the established internurse.com model to fit all journal websites. MAG was provided with tools to manage their complete library of articles across all journals / websites. MAG has the tools to create websites, add journals and issues and assign articles to issues. MAG can create an article, upload the document, add authors, keywords, title and description, all of which is stored in one centralised database.
- MAG relies on subscriptions to the various paper copy journals to sustain the organisation. MAG wanted to take the subscription process online, whereby users could buy a paper subscription, or institutions could buy an annual online subscription. Foresite created a user-friendly accounting system where users could register and purchase the subscription that suited them. The number of subscription options is vast with student, institutional and personal rates for everything. Foresite consolidated the user data from each site into one user database, so that a registered user on internurse.com would not need to register again on another MAG website to purchase a subscription.
- MAG was given intelligent administration tools that allowed searching by user, site, subscription type or journal.
- One of the main criticisms of the internurse.com website was that the end product, a downloaded article, was not of high quality in terms of printing badly, not representing the paper version and some images missing. During a fact finding session on-site at MAG it was discovered that all articles where produced in PDF format. Then MAG would save the images and convert into HTML. The PDF format was identical to the paper copy and printed well. Foresite recommended using PDF format for all articles and adapted the system to allow HTML and PDF articles.
- Foresite developed a website statistics package that would display stats for all the websites in a consistent format. Foresite also provided MAG with a banner ad manager allowing MAG to place banners on all sites and record this data.
- Foresite was commissioned to manage the integration of internurse.com titles into SwetsWise through an XML interface. Foresite liaised heavily with the NHS and SwetsWise to provide the six MA Healthcare titles to the NHS Core Content group
Results
- The consolidation of technology and hosting has massively reduced costs and given MAG improved control over their websites. As everything is built using the same foundation further development to the websites is quicker.
- The monthly project meetings have focused the organisation, all project managers are now aware of each others websites and decision and functionality developed for one website can now easily roll-out to all websites.
- MAG has consistent technology and brand across all their journal sites. Each journal, issue or article is managed through one administration system and the front-end website uses the same processes and technology. This has reduced the training costs as there is only one system used. The new system, along with using PDF articles, has halved data entry times and reduced administration overheads.
- MAG now have complete control over subscription rates, user access and their library of articles, which currently stands at 13,000, all through the same administration interface. All journal sites can now accept online payment for paper subscription, online access and pay-per-article. MAG have seen massive increases in subscriptions revenues on the websites and fully justified the decision to take all subscriptions payments online.
- MAG can analyse detailed statistics of usage on the website. MAG can also produce reports on actual amount of downloads per article per month. The banner ad manager has allowed MAG sales staff to sell specific areas on any given website, even selling space on the search results page based on the search terms.
- The integration with SwetsWise Online Content and the NHS has proved extremely successful and since launch in April over 41,000 articles have been downloaded. Subsequent MAG titles (Hospital Medicine) have been integrated and over time all journals will be available.
