YNST Magazine

YNST Magazine is a print and (and now) digital publication start-up that highlights the rich and diverse, yet often over-looked art and culture of the Appalachia region. We designed and developed their website to help them expand their reach to a new, digital audience, manage subscriptions, and sell merchandise. Complete with a three-tiered advertising system, e-commerce marketplace, and artwork submission and vendor application integrations, ynstmagazine.com is designed to grow B2B and B2C revenue, in addition to expanding the publication’s brand visibility, reach, and recognition online.

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UI/UX + Managed Hosting

YNST Magazine’s website is built to share the publication’s articles and other media on a digital platform that enables them to reach are larger outside both within and outside of the Appalachian region. We created the website’s information architecture and interface to coordinate with the publication’s brand guidelines, content structures, and visual aesthetic. Our mission was to deliver a user experience that seamlessly bridged the gap and provided a consistent brand experience between the publication’s print and digital media.

Tools:

Figma, Blender, Adobe After Effects, Photoshop, Illustrator, Flywheel, WordPress, Visual Studio Code

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Articles and Media

Creating a responsive, modular layout system for articles, galleries, and author profiles was a central part of our design strategy. This required close collaboration and coordination with our designers and developers to create custom blocks that could be implemented throughout the site by the client’s team via a back-end user interface, giving them full control of creative content creation without the risk of breaking the site layout.

  • Custom Gutenberg Editor Blocks
  • Custom Hero Image Blocks
  • Safe-Zone Graphic Templates

E-Commerce

YNST’s website includes an E-Commerce marketplace that allows their business to sell individual issues of the magazine, merchandise, and sell and manage annual subscriptions. We worked with the YNST leadership team to design and implement the E-commerce design strategy which included custom templates that managed WooCommerce and Stripe integrations for payment processing.

  • Seamless WooCommerce and Stripe Integrations
  • Automated, Branded Order Confirmation Emails
  • Taxes and Reporting Setup

Advertisement

We designed and implemented a three-tier advertisement system for YNST’s website which allows their team to manage ads both site-wide or locally on individual pages. There is also an advertisement inquiry portal which we have integrated into their team’s Monday.com task management system.

  • Three Tier Advertisement System
  • Advertisement Inquiry Portal
  • Task Manager Integrations

Content Strategy

Content strategy was based on industry research and analyzing YNST’s current publication release and how our team could create a sustainable UI/UX solution for sharing content and managing online sales in a way that delivers a consistent brand experience to their audience.

We also leveraged pre-existing mailing lists, and made recommendations for task management softwares that we integrated into their website to optimize their workflow.

Performance

This included adhering to W3C Standards and ADA Compliance. We also limited the use of unnecessary plugins to reduce loading time and the risk of security vulnerabilities that installing excessive plugins can pose.

Upon the initial launch, our team optimized all images to assure quick content loading speeds.

Managed Hosting

YNST’s website is hosted on our website hosting server. All sites on our server receive daily backups, monthly analytics, and a maintenance request portal that notifies our team to repair of any issues experienced on the website.

Their website is is secured with Two-Factor Authentication and login attempt limits to block unauthorized access to their sensitive information.