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Brief
More than just an RSS feed. The idea started out by needing a tool which allowed PR agencies to create and maintain industry-specific news content for display on their clients’ websites, without needing to access the websites themselves.
General news feeds allow subscribers to see when websites have added new content. They can get the latest headlines in one place, at the moment they are published, without actually needing to return to the website which originated that news. Typically RSS news is updated through a file called XML, however, mindful that most PR agencies or copy writers are not programmers, we decided to create a system that would manage all news feeds through a simple control panel.
In addition to updating subscription based news feeds, it became apparent that some agencies wished to display a ‘news’ section on a number of their clients’ websites without having to update them individually but rather to manage them through one central time-saving place.
Strategy
After conducting research on the scope and limitation of different code languages we decided to implement XML for its universal and highly flexible compatibility with all browsers thus allowing population to any common data-based format such as PDF, html, etc.
Publishing a feed is not very difficult but one has to understand the way XML files are created, structured and coded. We researched the Web for tools or applications offering the ability to create and modify RSS/Atom feeds and were surprised by the dearth of such tools.
We then thought why not allow clients the choice to publish the headlines or complete articles on third-party websites via a tool acting as a content management system for news and negate the need for clients to learn code or remember the passwords to a copious amount of control panels.
In addition to text-based content, the increasing popularity of YouTube has demonstrated the power of video storytelling, and we wanted to encapsulate the essence of video marketing as part of an easily maintained online news management system.
Execution
Having looked at other services that provide RSS feeds, throughout the build process, the goal was to take Easy Feed a step above those. After a specification and plenty of storyboarding other features were added to expand the offering for the product, such as, to give members the ability to validate their feed against industry accessibility protocol and to permit them to easily create RSS feeds that could insert YouTube videos at a click on an icon. Ease of use is central to Easy Feed.
One of our biggest challenges was to incorporate a simple method for users to both generate and extract a variety of source code required for the destination website. For instance, if a website was coded in PHP, EasyFeed would output a script compatible with that infrastructure. This was also the case for sites coded in html for which we provided Java Script and iframe variants.
Results
Taking 6 months to complete, Easy Feed is here. The core aim for the project was to introduce more people to the concept of syndicated news feeds as a channel of marketing and the benefit it can bring to business. Having trialled it with numerous PR agencies and professional copy writers, they share that not only the ease of creating news feeds is of considerable benefit to them, but their clients also.
EasyFeed allows them to manage campaigns from one central place and significantly improves the speed and ease of their communication.
It is a powerful syndication tool for any business providing content on a regular basis such as publishers, PR and marketing agencies and copy writers.
Easyfeed became a system that allows the content author to distribute their news on other websites and to benefit from a proved method of increasing the search engine ranking of their own website.
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