Introducing magCulture v5
If you’re reading this, you’re already experiencing our brand new web platform. Designed to draw together the many parts of magCulture into a clearer and more cohesive whole, we hope you’ll find it a huge improvement on the previous site.
Until now, the magCulture website has developed organically, this is the first time we’ve taken the opportunity to completely rethink the many parts of what we do online.
Launched in 2003 using a bespoke CMS (which ultimately proved too hard to use), the site moved to WordPress in 2006 and remained on that platform happily for 15 years.
The design of the site went through various changes, moving away from a pure blog roll presentation around 2009 and adopting the title ‘Journal’. We began to experiment with online shopping, first with Big Cartel and then a Shopify set-up alongside WordPress.
When we opened our real life shop in 2015 we stayed with Shopify, using it for sales in real life and online. But the Journal site was looking tired and the quickly expanded Shopify set-up was functional at best.
The two-headed WordPress/Shopify web presence worked but it was messy. Add in social media and then specialist platforms like Soundcloud, Vimeo and Eventbrite, and things got more and more fragmented. And then there was our mobile (lack of) presence..!
The dream was to reconcile all these parts so they worked together more elegantly.
We started exactly that process at the beginning of 2020, and it was quickly clear that not only would we have to combine the Journal and the Shop on a single platform, but that that platform should be Shopify.
Simply, Shopify could deal with content better than WordPress could cope with ecommerce.
Jump forward a year, and the site is live. The pandemic and lockdown delayed the work – it took longer than we hoped – but also enhanced the end result. The extra time was used to further refine and improve the detail.
The site was built by Shopify specialists Pixelcabin, and designed in collaboration with magCulture.
I hope you’ll take time to look around the new site and find yourself as excited as we are by the new combination of familiar elements.
In particular, please try the new Search function at the top of the home page: enter a magazine name and the results will show both Shop stock and Journal posts about the title. If one function sums up what we wanted to achieve it’s this one.
Unlike print, digital projects never ‘end’. There’s plenty of finessing still to be applied to texts and tags, and probably a few glitches to be spotted. But we’re excited to finally get the new magCulture out there; this is a huge step for magCulture, a jump into our future.
We hope you agree — let us know what you think!