Software Magazine launches on a new CMS

Software Magazine has been a respected name in the software publishing industry for over 30 years, and is home to the Software 500 ranking of the world's largest software and services companies.

With over 3000 pages of content and 50,000+ subscribers, softwaremag.com is a wealth of information on the Software industry, but managing the site on a daily basis was difficult and required multiple layers of personnel to make simple changes due to an outdated, home-grown content management system.

John Desmond, Software Magazines Publisher, contacted ten24 to help him bring the website in line with his vision for the company.  He wanted to update the look and feel of the site, provide a more search engine friendly infrastructure, and most of all, make the site easy to maintain and support. 

Through our Engineering process, ten24 provided a new user interface, focused maximizing the available content areas, and providing social sharing tools for each article on the site.  The entire database of content from the old platform was imported into ten24's CMS, with categories, authors and release dates assigned during the import.  And because of the incredible flexibility of our CMS, we were able to develop this utilizing the core functionality of the system, not having to rely on plugins to extend the platform.

ten24 coordinated a thorough content editing process with Software Magazine's editors to review each page, make sure that images and links had populated correctly, and fix any evident display issues.  There were also portions of the site that were flat HTML files and not included in the database so they needed to be moved over manually.

Although most of Software Magazine's content is free and available to the public there are certain items that require registration, such as their Buyer's Guides.

Software Magazine creates buyers guides as related content to many of the articles that they publish.  In the previous website, each Buyers Guide was created as a static HTML page, requiring someone to produce a spreadsheet and then pass that onto the webmaster so the page could be created and uploaded to the server, a process that could take several days.  ten24 has provided an automated process, allowing SM's editor to create the Buyer's Guide within the CMS, eliminating the need for hand coded HTML and reducing the time to publish dramatically.

Software Magazine is also utilizing ten24's send24 Email Marketing System to send marketing emails to a list of over 220,000 subscribes.  SM migrated from VerticalResponse because they were spending close to $1000 / month for this service.  send24 provides comparable features, is more easily customized and provides a lower, fixed cost, monthly fee.