The London Press Service website launches close

Over the last few months, we have been working on an exciting new project for UK Trade & Investment, a Government department that supports business. Today, I am really pleased to announce that the new website is now live: https://www.londonpressservice.org.uk/. The site aims to offer weekly stories and pictures that are free to use by journalists worldwide. It reports on latest innovations and developments in UK business, covering all sectors of industry, science and technology as well as creative, cultural and sports articles. Some stories are available in French, German, Spanish, Portuguese, Chinese and Japanese.

 

The back-end of the site had to be very easy to use as the editors, uploading numerous stories each day, will not always be technical wizards. We produced a bespoke content management system allowing them to easily add news stories and translations as well as the ability to add, crop and resize images directly within the CMS. The great thing about this is that users don’t need to spend valuable time editing pictures in Photoshop before putting their stories up. In less than a week, the editorial team have uploaded more than 50 stories and countless images onto the site!

 

The front-end is simple, fresh and attractive. Users can browse stories by category, sub-category, author and date and we have created some really cool usability features to enhance the user experience of journalists, such as the image library built in Flash. Beautifully executed, it makes it really easy to scan through images quickly and to see the information associated with it such as the credits and linked story. Users are also able to download the high-resolution version and add images they like to a virtual lightbox which does not require any login or registration. This cookie-based feature is particularly useful as it means that journalists can quickly find the images they have saved on previous visits to the site without having to dig around again.

 

This is, of course, just a snippet of the site’s functionality, to have a full experience, check it out: www.londonpressservice.org.uk

 

Finally, it is worth mentioning that one of the crucial requirements of the site was that it was secure. Consequently, the whole site (back-end & front-end) went through an extremely rigorous security assessment (performed by an information security company) and has been built in line with security best practice guidelines.