Microsoft Corporate PR
Microsoft is a well-known leader in technology. Chances are, you use Microsoft hardware or software products in your daily life. Microsoft publishes a great deal of content to the web, not only in promotion of their products, but also for education on topics of technology, security and more. We have designed and developed several properties for Microsoft on the WordPress platform.
Microsoft News Center
We recently teamed up with Microsoft to relaunch the Microsoft News Center. WebDevStudios was involved in every stage of this project, including custom design, complex data migration from a proprietary content management system to WordPress across thirty eight sites in sixteen different languages, and extensive custom development of the WordPress theme and plugins that helped Microsoft achieve their goal of publishing independence.
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Custom Design
Adhering to Microsoft’s strict branding guidelines, the design and layout of the site is a result of several weeks of collaboration between our talented designers and Microsoft’s creative team.
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Platform Conversion
With the primary goal of publishing independence, Microsoft handed us the task of migrating almost a decade of data from a proprietary system into WordPress, across 38 separate sites.
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Custom Theme
Our team built a custom WordPress theme that includes dynamic features like a featured hero grid that is editable from the front end, filterable multimedia galleries for images & videos.
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Custom Plugin Development
The Microsoft News Center editorial staff can login using their MS Live credentials through a custom plugin we developed for a single sign on feature. Other custom plugin features include development for filtering, custom search, interactive timelines, and more.
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Multiple Languages
A Multisite project with 38 unique sites that span 16 languages, all our custom development was created to be translation-ready and we worked closely with their language teams to build the individual language packs.
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Support & Maintenance
We have developed a long-term relationship with Microsoft to provide ongoing support and maintenance for their News Center for updates, training and new feature requests.
Design That Responds on All Devices
In today’s market, it is important to provide your visitors an experience on your web site that is accessible by all, and that means across all devices including desktop, tablet, and mobile.
We approach all projects with a ‘mobile-first’ approach that allows your website and content to adapt to screens of many sizes.
Long Form Content Design
Taking advantage of WordPress custom post types and custom meta fields, we created a solution for Microsoft’s request that enables their editorial staff to create long form stories on their News Center, like this announcement about the collaboration between Microsoft and the NFL.
Their editorial staff can create a new story with a high degree of flexibility by selecting which type of content field they would like to add through an easy point-and-click / drag-and-drop interface, developed as a custom feature just for Microsoft.