blog.public.gr

About Public

Public is the largest chain of technology and entertainment department stores in Greece. Born in 2005, it now counts 55 stores in Greece and Cyprus, 2 online shops, 1.700 employees, 25m on-site visitors, 41m online visitors, over a million social media followers and a thousand free events per year. The company has also created the first Greek marketplace and offers a ticketing service.

With a product number now exceeding 1,5 million, Public is moving forward with its vision to lay the foundation for tomorrow's retail and make people's daily lives better.

Guiding Users to Content

Public Blog publishes a high volume of articles to cater to the needs of its visitors of a wide interest and age range. To highlight this content, we used Information Architecture. We divided the content into 10 main categories (Books, Technology, Gaming, Entertainment, Fitness, Home, Kids, Videos and Guides) and subcategories and created clear navigation paths to lead visitors to the content they are interested in. 

By placing three distinct buttons on the blog’s header we made sure the blog drives traffic to Public’s Events page, e-shop and ticketing service. As for content categories and subcategories, we created a sticky menu that accompanies users as they navigate throughout the blog’s pages enabling them to easily find content categories and what they are looking for.

Lastly, we created a dedicated Events page, where users are able to browse events according to city, interest and date, learn more about them and fill out event forms when necessary. To offer an even better experience we created a “seat management tool” indicating seat availability to users.

Reimagining the User Interface

After studying carefully Public’s main website design elements and aesthetics, we created a fresher User Interface by incorporating to the design, contemporary UI trends such as card design, typography and white space. The result was a user-friendly design that is also action-oriented, that highlights content and navigation paths, provides the user with an easy and clear experience, encourages the user to act and provides an overall aesthetically pleasing and smooth experience.

Offering an Accelerated User Experience at the Blink of an Eye

Creating an effective and fast User Experience from every end for such a complex product requires implementing cutting-edge technologies and craftsmanship.

First of all, when dealing with high volume, content page speed is of the essence. After our successful implementation Public Blog loads in the blink of an eye (100% page speed score on desktop and 86% on mobile devices)! Another important factor is managing the content and providing a seamless experience regardless of the device. For that reason, we used Drupal, our trusted open-source CMS platform for building amazing experiences. It is scalable and offers effective content management tools that help brands deliver the right content to the right person at the right time- on the right device.

In addition, offering a seamless experience across devices is important to users. Thus, we created a Progressive Web App and accelerated mobile pages to help content pages load faster, with less data consumption, aiming to increase mobile searches and deliver an uninterrupted experience.

Migrating For A Better Framework

We decided to move Public Blog’s pre-existing content from Wordpress to Drupal 8 since it enabled us to customize it and offered powerful caching logic, which is important for high-traffic sites. Our Dev team has over 10 years of experience in implementing bespoke websites on Drupal and creating frameworks that are robust, secure and stable.

During content migration, we made sure every piece of content (text, images, videos, rich media, profiles, bloggers/authors etc.) was moved successfully and that pre-existing articles retained their gained value. Old URLs were redirected to new URLs to avoid the increase of 404 pages and content was made available for search engines.