How Minute Media’s Websites Are Built

Minute Media has made a name for itself in the past few years as a successful, up-and-coming player in the digital publishing industry. We kickstarted our operation with our flagship brand,  90min, in the early 2010s, and since then the company has grown to own and operate six sites covering various verticals including sports, entertainment, esports and athlete-first storytelling.

With this growth we realized that in order to maintain and provide our tech offering to a growing number of partners, we had to build a strong platform behind them.

Keep It Smart

Minute Media’s publishing platform offers partners flexibility and design freedom in order to create distinct, unique site designs for their brands. Over the years, our experience in operating websites has led us to create what we call Minute Media’s smart site structure.

This is the backbone and foundation on which our platform is built, and it is structured around six key areas:

Performance

Our efficient backend infrastructure targets scalability and growth, boosting overall site performance on all page types. We employ several advanced technical infrastructure solutions that guarantee optimal performance for our clients, such as:

• Server Side Rendering (SSR)
• CSS in Javascript
• Lazy image loading
• Minimizing critical requests chain
• Efficient code bundling

Design Freedom

Our platform features strong and flexible design capabilities. By offering a variety of templates to choose from and personalized site theme customization, we’re committed to creating a unique and identifiable experience for every partner that joins our platform. Additionally, all of our  templates are designed with a mobile-first approach, meaning all components are fully responsive and guaranteed to display perfectly on any device, be it a desktop, tablet or smartphone.

Simplicity

Minute Media cuts the cost of website operations, allowing our partners to focus strictly on creating a quality content experience without spending hours on website setup and configuration. Furthermore, with our platform, publishers can control and change various site aspects without relying on developers or IT personnel.

Scalability

Our platform is designed with scalability at heart; we don’t focus on building cherry picked features that are tailored to specific sites or clients; instead, we evaluate and assess every new feature from a system perspective. Our goal is to build features that expand and enhance our platform offering, without limiting it.

Automated Advertisements

Our experience in optimizing monetization and maximizing margins is a recipe for publisher success. There’s no need to worry about ad integrations, placement, and vendors; we’ve got you covered. Our publishing platform suite offers full ad serving, including an integrated video player,  real-time bidding from direct advertisers and a wide variety of top-notch ad providers.

SEO

Facilitated by a dedicated team of SEO experts, our partners benefit from advanced SEO configurations and optimizations focused on drastically improving site ranking in Search Engine Result Pages (SERPs) and increasing organic traffic.

If You Build It, They Will Come.

So how are websites built?

Think of how you would build a house: first, you lay the foundation, then you build rooms which create floors that are stacked on top of each other, you add a roof, some paint, furniture, and you’ve got yourself a house.

Websites are not all that different.

Every website is built using basic elements, which, when combined, form an entire page, these elements are our house foundations, and they’re called Building Blocks.

Building Blocks are created by combining at least two or more of the following elements:

• Image
• Title
• Subtitle
• Author Name
• Publication Timestamp

We can independently control which of the above data types we wish to display on any block, and alter their orientation. This flexibility ensures our platform is able to accommodate almost any design challenge.

Combining the data types we listed above in different orientations establishes the five main building blocks that are used to create our websites:

 Section Headline

Headlines Card (HLC)

 Vertical Card (VC)

Horizontal Card (HC)

 On Top Card (OTC)

Now that we know what our main building blocks are, it’s time to understand how we can leverage their individual strengths and use them to create a unique and diversified website. 

Combining several building blocks in various orientations, creates Layout Components (LC). If building blocks are the house foundations, layout components are the rooms.

For example, this content section is built from a section headline and a layout component containing four vertical cards and one on top card in a horizontal 2-2-1 orientation:

Next, we combine layout components together to create content sections, which in turn form a Full Page Template, with the ability to control every individual part in the process. Each full page template (Ex: www.dbltap.com) completes one the floors in our house. 

There are four main page type templates that are used to craft the core experience of a website:

• Homepage - the front page of your website (you only have one, so make it count!)
• Category Page - internal pages dedicated to cover content on a specific topic (a site can contain many category pages depending on the amount of content)
• Post Page or Article Page - pages dedicated to displaying the content that authors publish on the site
• Author Page - pages dedicated to displaying an aggregated list of all articles written by a specific author

Wrapping It Up

In this article, we covered the basics on how Minute Media entered the publishing platform world with an innovative solution; and we learned how the process of creating a new website has simplified using current technology.

We emphasized how important it is to build features that are based on system integrity and future proofing our platform, while understanding the key roles and functions of the smart infrastructure behind it.

Minute Media’s publishing platform holds true potential to become one of the leading platforms in the industry. We’re fully committed to providing a streamlined, scalable experience to any publisher that wants to enjoy a frictionless implementation process, benefit from our high-end technological infrastructure and step into a new and exciting publishing universe.

There’s much more to uncover, and we’ve only just scratched the surface. We invite you to join the ride with us and bring new life to your websites. We power passion, and that’s guaranteed.

For more information on Minute Media’s publishing solutions visit www.minutemedia.com or email PubOps@minutemedia.com.