Research Professional

Research Professional is a successful publishing and data business with a strong technology focus based in Shoreditch, London and part of Ex Libris, a ProQuest company. They provide information about the research funding environment to organisations (mostly universities) to help them better achieve their goals.

Research Professional approached ClarityDX as enterprise WordPress experts looking for a revamp in their public facing news website: researchprofessionalnews.com. Research Professional at the time had a basic news website built on a Java-based CMS and a desire for a refreshed WordPress news website to allow the news team to share stories outside of the Research Professional paywall.

The intent was to create a site that draws in more traffic, highlights Research Professional News’ high-quality journalism, and demonstrated the breath of content available on the paid Research Professional site.

Discovery & Definition

During the first phase of the project, following consultation with Research Professional, ClarityDX focused on delivering wireframes and early stage functional specification outlining how the designs will be built and how content would be fed into the site from other sources via APIs.

UX, Design & Development

Based on the UX wireframes, ClarityDX produced high fidelity designs and built a lightweight and simple bespoke WordPress theme that highlighted the key news stories, demonstrating the high-quality journalism Research Professional News offers with the aim of increasing traffic to the website.

An ‘Editorial team’ page was also produced, showcasing the article authors to gather interest and credibility for the site.

The site integrates with Research Professional’s own API to pull content from other sites into the WordPress install, and our development team worked with the Research Professional team to launch the site on AWS.

Content Migration

ClarityDX built an API integration to import content, as Research Professional’s primary website is currently built on a Java-based CMS.

ClarityDX approached content migration in two stages. The first focused on the initial population of historical content by exporting and importing. The second was a continued automation insertion of posts once published through the CMS into the new site via an API integration.