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By Ben Finklea on
Tech Guy Labs is an innovative site the supports Leo Laporte's nationally syndicated radio program, The Tech Guy. The site is unique in that it breaks each episode of the show down into individual segments like call-in questions and news stories. This allows Leo's staff to include more detailed transcripts, lets listeners add their own input to on-air questions, and makes presenting an attractive overview of each episode much easier. In addition geocoding allows the Tech Guy Labs team to easily build interactive maps of caller questions and stations that air the show. This site was built entirely from concept to launch within 12 weeks.
Tech Guy Labs was a 2013 Blue Drop Awards finalist for Best Media Website Built With Drupal.
Why Drupal was chosen:
The Tech Guy Labs site was build over five years ago as a wiki, to facilitate quick changes. Over the years, though, the unstructured content became impossible for the staff to maintain. It was time for a change, and previous experience with Drupal (and Lullabot) convinced Leo Laporte that it was the right way to go.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
Leo Laporte set up a website many years ago to support his nationally syndicated radio program, The Tech Guy. It was originally a very basic wiki site which didn't provide much value for Leo's listeners nor support the brand he'd established for himself. He approached Lullabot to relaunch the site as something more useful to the end user, and as a tool to interact and engage with his audience in connection to the syndicated broadcasts.
Lullabot iterated the ideas of Leo and his team, and took their vision from concept to launch within an extremely short timeframe. Lullabot provided overall strategy, design, branding, and development; creating a new site that's fully responsive and offers a much better complement to Leo's on-air product. The end result is a completely reimagined site that enhances listenership and engagement, while at the same time driving increased revenue through advertising.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
The custom field types allow every episode of the show to be broken down into cleanly-structured data, and the Geocoder module allows the site to generate custom maps from the limited location information that's often gathered for callers and syndicating stations. The HMS and Youtube Field modules, combined with a custom formatter, allow users to quickly jump to key points in each recorded episode. Panels handles a number of custom presentation tasks, and the Disqus module allows commenting to be handled by a high-performance third-party API.
Project team:
Development Company: Lullabot
Sectors:
Technology
