News site

The events of recent years have caused serious concern among people: the pandemic, the invasion of Ukraine, global warming and advances in artificial intelligence are just a small part of the “hot” topics in the world media. This led to a significant increase in subscribers to information platforms.

In the last few years alone, their number has increased by as much as 200%. If you look at the situation from a business point of view, now there are very favorable conditions for launching your own news portal. We tell you how to do this in our article.

Surprisingly, the most important and difficult stage in launching a news resource is deciding what it will tell its visitors about. Of course, on your future website you can write about everything, copying the content of the Washington Post or The Times, but you shouldn’t expect success from such a project. In such a model, the material will not be unique, plus you will constantly lag behind the original in time, which is why the ranking of your portal in search engines will be low and there will be few visitors.

The right decision would be to choose a specific niche and focus on the interests of a specific audience. For example, the niche could be “Sports news”, and the target audience could be athletes, Europeans or American students. However, each of these audiences will need different content:

• Athletes want to read about things that affect their careers. This could include news about upcoming events, eligibility rules, sponsors and advertisers, or changes to doping laws.
• Europeans will be interested in information about the results of games and tournaments, the behind-the-scenes lives of athletes (got married, moved to another club, went on vacation) and other similar things.
• American students are another distinct audience. They will want to read about events in collegiate sports leagues in the US and Canada, the recruitment of young athletes by large clubs, etc.

These are just a few examples, and in practice there are many more options. Your task at this stage is to choose a direction with a minimum number of competitors and a fairly wide target audience.

Almost all news portals work according to the same scheme – employees monitor news, rewrite the most interesting and relevant ones, and then publish them on the website. The only difference is how they make money:

• Publication of advertisements. This is the most common and easiest way to generate income. Here you can go two ways – receive direct income from advertisers or money from Google Ads. In the first case, you will be able to control the appearance and content of the advertisement yourself, and in the second, this responsibility falls on Google algorithms.
• Selling subscriptions. In this model, in order to access content, the user must purchase a subscription.

Some portals provide some material for free, such as news, but provide various analytical materials, interviews and insider information only to paid users.

• Selling individual articles. To read specific material you need to pay a fixed amount.
• No monetization. This is usually how government, commercial and scientific portals work. They do not make any money from traffic and exist due to subsidies from the budget, donations or sponsorship.

Next, you need to decide what functionality will need to be implemented in order to organize an effective process of joint creation, publication and management of content, what modules users will need to comfortably work with the portal, and design the UX of the site. To solve these and many other problems, developers create a prototype of a news resource.

Typically, such a prototype includes four main components:

• Warframes interface.

• Table describing the functionality.
• Block diagrams of modules.
• Project mathematics – a list of formulas that will ensure the implementation of the business logic of the resource.

Based on the mockup, the development team will be able to accurately calculate the timing and cost of the project, as well as select the optimal technology stack.

The task of any news portal is to attract maximum traffic, and the higher its traffic, the more income it generates. Taking this into account, it is worth choosing a reliable set of technologies for project development that can provide high performance.

The optimal choice would be:

For the client part (frontend) – JavaScript frameworks Vue and React, or standard HTML/CSS/JS technologies.

For the server part (backend) – The PHP frameworks Yii2/Laravel and the Python frameworks Django/Flask are perfect for implementing a web project with a monolithic architecture, and the Java language is ideal for choosing a microservice architecture. In addition, the backend can be implemented on the Node.js platform.

All these tools are free and can be used for commercial purposes without restrictions. At the same time, you need to understand that there is no “universal” or “best” technology – the selection of a stack is always done individually, taking into account the unique features and functionality of the project.

A team of UI designers creates a unique visual design for a news site, focused on a specific niche and target audience.

It is very important that the design is convenient, attractive and inspires the trust of visitors – this will be the key to success for the entire project.

The technical implementation of a news portal is the most extensive and lengthy stage. It can be divided into two main parts:

Frontend development. Frontend is the client side of the portal with which visitors will interact. It is responsible for the correct display of the resource in the browser, the operation of visual effects, animations and data entry.

Backend development. This is the server side, responsible for storing, processing and providing data to the client upon user request. In addition, the backend ensures the implementation of business logic, functionality and integration of the resource with external sites. When development is complete, QA engineers thoroughly test all modules and, if necessary, debug them.

After its release, the news site will begin to gain popularity and earn authority. Therefore, it is very important to continue to focus on providing visitors with qualified technical support and the continuous development of the project.

Combined with quality marketing, this will allow you to quickly bring your resource to the forefront.

To launch a successful news portal you will need three things: an idea, a development strategy and a professional development team. AVADA MEDIA will be able to help you with the competent technical implementation of the project at all stages – from target audience research and design, to development and further support.

To learn more about the experience of our teams and discuss options for implementing your idea, fill out the feedback form on our website.