Getting out of vendor lock and preparing for the future

(Web) Stories around the campfire

After our team completed the initial performance work with COWGIRL, we noticed a large opportunity for growth in the editorial space. While not a new concept, Web Stories had just recently been made available as a WordPress plugin. This unique multimedia content type lends itself perfectly to COWGIRL’s audience and editorial workflow.

“I had no idea this was out there. They sent me a link to a story and I looked at it and thought ‘Wow! This is great stuff!’ I was really excited about it.”– Ken Amorosano

Between Ken’s excitement for this new media-driven, visually immersive, short-format content experience, and our team’s eagerness to see COWGIRL continue to grow, we set to work building the Web Stories plugin into the new site. Two major questions helped guide our approach. 

How would stories be displayed? 

Although many of us are familiar with stories, they’re usually only seen in a social media setting. In many programs where stories exist, there is a bar located across the main screen showing which of your followers has a story up. You tap that circle, and it immediately takes you to that user’s posted story. These usually last for 24 hours, but can be saved for later viewing. 

While web stories function similarly, they are consumed and interacted with in a completely different way than on social media. For example, they are not seen in the traditional ‘stories’ setting, i.e. the walled garden of social media feeds. Instead a user views them through the publisher’s website. Web stories go beyond the ‘humble brag’ of stories on social media. Publishers and creators own their own content, tell compelling editorial stories, and benefit from the SEO boost that comes along with publishing quality content on a regular basis. This brings about a unique set of challenges that our design team considered and iterated on multiple times. 

Cathi Bosco, UX Researcher, developed several iterations of how stories could be displayed to the user. 

This mockup explored how stories could be displayed within the homepage. As users scrolled down the page, they would experience a horizontal bar allowing them to scroll through existing stories. This experience would be familiar to most users, as you would ‘swipe’ a certain direction to find new stories, just as you would on social media. 

One notable difference between social media stories and COWGIRL’s display is the function of the circle icon in the middle of the preview. Instead of showing the author or poster, which is common on social media platforms, the image would describe the category of the story, like ‘Horses,’ ‘Lifestyle,’ or ‘Individual Spotlight.’ 

This mockup demonstrates how stories could be displayed on their own page. Like most websites that have a ‘blog’ or ‘articles’ section, stories would be given their own page to live on within the site itself. This allows users to navigate straight to web stories if they’re looking for specific content. 

Ultimately, we settled on a layout that would look familiar to users, but still fit in with the general look and feel of COWGIRL’s new website. 

How would stories be created? 

It doesn’t matter if you have a place to display web stories if there are no web stories to display. That’s when our designers stepped in to help introduce Ken and his editorial team to the new ways of thinking needed to create enticing web stories. 

“WIth visual storytelling we gather all of the visual assets first. We prepare our video clips, images, color styles, fonts, text blocks, animation sequences, maybe leverage a template and then we create our story editorially using text minimally in a supportive role. The editorial workflow is the reverse of text-based storytelling where we write first and then grab some media to support the written content. It is very rewarding to support publishers through this shift in the editorial and creative processes, because the results are incredibly compelling experiences.”– Cathi Bosco, Designer / UX Researcher, XWP

The XWP team developed an individualized training document and held one-on-one sessions with Ken and his team to walk them through the web stories plugin, how to maximize its potential, and how to think about content production. 

Advertising within Stories

Some of the most exciting opportunities that come with stories, for publishers in particular, are new ways of displaying advertisements to users. Companies are constantly looking for new ways to entice viewers who have grown blind to banner ads or full-page takeovers. The capabilities that web stories offer provide a new opportunity for publishers to woo advertisers, and early adopters of this medium, like COWGIRL, will be ahead of the curve.

“I’m working with our sales team to create a whole new media kit to offer products to advertisers, so we can build a story specifically for them that they sponsor, or build an ad inside a story itself. We’re going to be experimenting with that a lot…to see what works.”– Ken Amorosano

Impacts on traffic and growth

While COWGIRLmagazine.com was already on the AMP framework, the move to the official AMP plugin using Newspack as a theme improved performance and search visibility.

“In the last 90 days, organic traffic has increased tremendously.”– Ken Amorosano

The use of stories to entice and intrigue users has also had an impact on visibility in search. As Google continues to prioritize user-friendly content types, early adopters of web stories will grow their reach and expand their names within the publishing community as innovators.