Brand development for high traffic websites
Case study
DJWORX is the original DJ tech news, reviews and opinion site. Founded in 2003 as Skratchworx, the site has been at the forefront of the DJ industry ever since. However, the site had been mothballed during the pandemic. The DJ industry was in crisis with no live events. The previous owner was winding up his interest in the site, so there was no investment in the website design, structure or content. Traffic was slipping as a result of this, and the website was beginning to break. The old design theme was starting to create problems, and was relying on a lot of custom code just to remain functional.
So at Refec we put our money where our mouth is and purchased the brand at the start of 2024. Our aim is to take DJWORX back to and past it’s previous traffic targets and to broaden the sites appeal to the ever growing DJ market.
Solution
Scoping
At Refec we did a full site audit to understand the main issues facing DJWORX. Once these were identified we split these into priorities and created a timeline. Initially we were going to immediately change the website’s design but it became clear that a straight update would have brought a lot of the old code over to the new one. So we had to undertake a major house cleaning exercise.
This entailed but wasn’t restricted to:
Technical
- Independent technical and SEO experts were employed to offer deep experience on particularly troublesome areas
- Large numbers of old outdated content and posts were deleted or repurposed
- Images were properly resized or deleted if unused
- Pages were properly SEO’d (although this is an ongoing task)
- Posts that were competing for search rankings were rationalised
Branding
Social media branding was realigned with a universal @ as opposed to the several different names that had been used previously
Detail
Content
New writers were added to the freelance pool
The style guide was updated
The editorial tone was realigned, with a more commercial outlook that didn’t stray too far away from the sites original ethos
A mission statement was written and posted
Design
The website look and theme needed to be overhauled. From the outside it looked ok, but was failing numerous Google Core Web Vitals. These are essential for a website to feature highly in Google search results. It also wasn’t a great mobile reading experience, meaning that more than half of the audience were receiving sub-par mobile viewing. The new design we implemented is optimised for mobile, and looks great. However optimisation is an ongoing non-linear process. We constantly monitor the websites performance against key metrics, and ammend and update where necessary.
Result
Previously DJWORX had a single revenue line – Display advertising. This hadn’t changed since the brands launch but the market had evovled. Direct advertising revenue is increasingly hard to attract, so the brand needed to diversify. Just some of the initiatives we have introduced include – Affiliate, programmatic, merchandise sales, social media sponsosrship, sponsored content and a JV with a well respected DJ course suplier. These will contiue to evolve over time, but the brand is no longer so wedded to the whims of external companies dispay advertising budgets.
Whilst it will take time for DJWORX to climb back to its previous highs of over 100,000 unique users every month, progress has been steady and sustainable. There have been significant traffic spikes throughout the period, showing that interest is still very much alive in both the subject matter and the brand.
DJWORX New
DJWORX Old
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