Four aviation titles, one publishing platform
01 — The brief
Run four magazines without running four websites
HeliOps has covered the helicopter industry for over two decades, and the publisher now produces three more titles alongside it: Air Attack, Antares and Carpe Noctem.
Each title has its own readership, its own issue numbering, its own news feed and its own back catalogue. Four separate websites would have meant four sets of everything, maintained by a very small team.
The brief was a single platform where a title is a section rather than a site: shared reader accounts, one shop, one jobs board, with every masthead keeping its own front page, news, articles, wallpapers and issue archive.
Every title, every issue The latest issue of all four mastheads sits on one page with its contents listed, and the archive behind it runs back through more than two hundred issues.
By the numbers
One build, four mastheads
Feature
The annual photo competition is a small application in its own right. Photographers register, upload their entries against categories, and the shortlist and winners are published on the site rather than announced by email.
- Entrant registration and login
- Image upload with category selection
- Contest rules, privacy and eligibility published
- Photographer profiles
- Shortlist and winners galleries
- Photos of the Week running year round
One audience, several roles
Readers, buyers, entrants and job hunters
The site has to recognise the same person in four different roles.
A reader might follow a title, buy a calendar, enter the photo competition and browse the jobs board in one visit. The CRM keeps a single contact record behind all of it.
The jobs board lets operators list vacancies and readers apply from a registered account, which turns an audience into a service the industry pays attention to.
02 — The process
How we got there
- 01
Structuring four titles
One content model with the masthead as a dimension, so a news item, an article, an issue or a wallpaper belongs to a title without needing its own site.
- 02
Designing per masthead
Each title keeps its own identity, colour and front page while sharing the same navigation, account system and checkout.
- 03
Building the issue archive
Every issue is a record with its contents, cover and title, which is what makes more than two thousand archive pages navigable instead of a file dump.
- 04
Shop, subscriptions and the photo competition
Commerce for prints and calendars, a notification list for new issues, and a photo competition with entrant accounts, uploads, judging and published winners.
- 05
Jobs board and ongoing publishing
Operators list vacancies, readers apply, and the editorial team publishes news across all four titles from one place.
Photography as the product Aviation photography is the reason readers come back between issues. Photos of the Week, wallpapers and the competition galleries give the site a reason to be visited weekly, not six times a year.
03 — The outcome
A publishing house on one platform
Four titles, a shop, a jobs board and a competition, run by a small team without four sets of admin.
Adding a title is a configuration exercise rather than a new project, which is how Carpe Noctem and Antares joined the stable without a new build each time.
The archive keeps earning: back issues, articles and photography bring in readers who then subscribe, buy a print or enter the competition.
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Design, build, content and search, handled by one Auckland team.
