Mugo partner since 2011
Habitat Magazine, based in New York, has been providing topical and important content for co-op and condo boards, residents, businesses, and other interested parties for 35 years.
Habitat Magazine needed to be creative in evolving its traditional print paid circulation model into a thriving multi-channel, online strategy.
I am very excited for Habitat’s continued growth as we launch new products and digital offerings. We are proud to serve the New York real estate community and provide a great customer experience. Mugo Web has helped us manage our content wisely and ensure we are prepared for the future.
- Carol Ott
Habitat’s clearly defined focus on the concerns of co-op/condo board directors and property managers in the greater New York area has earned it a high-value audience of about 7,500 paid subscribers. However, its ability to scale is limited to a relatively small geographic area – as big as it is, New York is just one market. And Habitat targets a very specialized audience.
So Habitat’s growth initiatives are focused on creating new digital revenue streams and engagement for its established user base. This has meant trial and error powered by a modern, flexible DXP.
Since moving to eZ Platform two decades ago, Habitat has launched a series of iterative projects to advance its digital transformation. Each of these projects has shared these key underlying business requirements:
The agility of eZ Platform has enabled Habitat and its development partner, Mugo Web, to innovate without facing prohibitive development costs. Following a complete site relaunch and platform update, Habitat has taken an iterative approach to rolling out new features, all tied to specific business metrics.
Habitat’s willingness to try creative new strategies has led to many successes. And even when an experiment doesn’t quite meet its three core business goals, Habitat can recalibrate its strategies with a better understanding of its audience.
Here’s a look at a couple of projects the team at Habitat and Mugo Web have conceptualized and implemented, and the impact each has on Habitat’s core business.
Much of Habitat’s print reporting has “evergreen” value to its core audience. Habitat publishes unique web content daily, but an online content repository of its print articles made sense. Habitat is using a gated content model that allows readers to see a few articles before requiring them to sign up for a subscription. Users can opt for a 24-hour pass or an annual subscription. Mugo implemented a rich taxonomy structure so that users can easily search and drill down into the types of articles they want to read.
The results: Habitat has seen that most people opt for an annual subscription, which includes the archive as well as the digital magazine and e-newsletters. Habitat can now take advantage of this asset and in entirely new ways -- for instance, as a specialized knowledge base for a co-op board of directors. Having all its content in a scalable CMS enables Habitat to quickly respond to any such opportunities in its market, where information is considered at a high premium.
Habitat has developed several multi-channel, interactive user experiences that also provide unique sponsorship opportunities.
These include Ask the Experts, which are sponsored videos showcasing industry insiders, and Seeking Counsel, which offers legal insights. These digital elements build upon print elements, and are made possible by the flexible content model set up in the CMS. It also uses targeting and inventory management features of Google Ad Manager, which Mugo implemented during Habitat’s site re-launch.
The results: Revenues from multi-channel editorial experiences have grown by 68% since 2016. (Overall, online ad revenue has doubled since the Ad Manager implementation.) The three-pronged strategy of print/video/display has proven so successful that Habitat has developed branded offerings on many topic areas.
So, what are the biggest lessons Habitat has learned during its ongoing evolution from a traditional print publisher to a multi-channel digital platform?
Amazon Web Services (AWS) EC2 has the reputation of being a pricey option for cloud-based hosting and compute resources. Certainly, that was our initial impression here at Mugo Web years ago when we began standardizing our hosting and site management business on a single cloud platform.
However, we quickly discovered that AWS is actually quite affordable. In fact, our monthly costs for a virtual machine using 8GB of RAM, at 100% usage, is predictably lower with AWS than with other virtualized or traditional data centers. That’s without aggressively tuning our resource usage, which is often the focus of how to optimize AWS pricing.
In this post, I’ll show you how AWS can be a cost-effective option for professionally managed websites. I’ll also take a quick look at some of the additional savings tactics you can employ to get more value from your decision to run on AWS.
In this blog post I am going to talk about several security best practices, particularly for configuring AWS Access Keys. Some of these practices are based on a project that we inherited which was compromised by hackers. Best practices are often learned from mistakes; and when the mistakes are someone else's, so much the better!
If you were used to the Open Source version of eZ Publish, you are probably familiar with the eZ Flow extension, which allows editors to build pages visually specifying the components based on a Layout, Zones, and Blocks system. Users that have migrated to the Ibexa OSS might have noticed that there is no such system available, only the Ibexa Page Builder, which is restricted to the Enterprise version.
At Mugo, we love to contribute to the Open Source community. After identifying this need, we decided to create a prototype for an alternative to the eZ Flow extensions for Ibexa OSS. With that in mind, we created the Mugo Page Bundle as a simple way to build page layouts.
Managing bot access to your website is one of the least sexy tasks a site manager handles. You just identify the bot’s user agent, edit robots.txt to allow or disallow access, and you’re done. Right?
Of course, nothing’s ever quite that simple when it comes to safeguarding your web identity. Sure, robots.txt is still the industry stalwart – it’s a tactic we often use for our clients here at Mugo Web when we want to block a specific bot for some practical reason.
Mugo partner since 2023
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Mugo Web
Unit 205, 332 Columbia Street
New Westminster, BC
V3L 1A6, Canada
Phone: 604-637-6396
E-mail: hi@mugo.ca
