The New York Sun

The WebTitans team started by studying what makes digital newspaper experiences work. That research shaped two homepage concepts (one evolving the Sun's familiar layout, one led by the research), the article page and the first sitemap. In the first weeks we also mapped user journeys and created desktop and mobile mockups for the Sun's sales and launch materials.

We designed the reading experience around how a daily paper is actually read: homepage hierarchy, article pages, section navigation, a founder page and an About page that introduces the newsroom. Design moved into a live build quickly, so the team reviewed real pages instead of static comps, and we worked through feedback in structured review rounds up to launch.

We separated editing from reading:

• For the newsroom: a WordPress back end with custom content types, editor and author roles, and membership modules, on cloud hosting.
• For readers: a fast Next.js front end on a modern deployment platform.

Editors got a CMS they already knew, and readers got a fast, modern site. The separation also meant each side could scale, change hosts or be optimized without disrupting the other.

Once the Sun chose its paywall and identity platform, we handled the technical onboarding and integration:

• registration and passwordless sign-up
• sign-up and article-limit pop-ups
• logout flows
• access control for premium features such as the daily crossword
• membership tiers: Sun Reader, Sun Member and Sun Founder

After launch we kept refining the membership funnel. We made the payment form consistent across the site, restored coupon codes and built a combined login and sign-up form. We also switched the header's "Join" call to action to "Upgrade" for existing members, and added a dedicated modal to welcome back lapsed readers.

Email is central to the new Sun, with a Morning Sun and an Evening Sun every day. We built an emailer tool inside the CMS so editors could assemble and send newsletters from the platform they already worked in, ready at launch. We also built email-capture and exit-intent pop-ups, a scroll-triggered homepage sign-up, a newsletter sign-up flow tied into the membership platform, and support for a referral program.

We wrote a migration script that moved the Sun's legacy articles from the old site's export into the new CMS, and built and maintained redirect maps so old links still resolved. After launch we hunted down broken links, kept the development site out of search results, improved sitemaps and structured data, made performance fixes, and supported the Sun's SEO partner on its priorities.

The Sun ran on a network of specialist partners, and the WebTitans team was the technical hub connecting them:

• Analytics and revenue: a data layer exposing article metadata, plus standardized membership event naming.
• Ad operations: ad placements and tags.
• Syndication: RSS feeds, including a dedicated feed for a news aggregator.

After launch we stayed on as the Sun's development team:

• Monitoring and servers: built a monitoring tool to catch outages early, supported the backup host, and upgraded the CMS server for faster editing.
• Hosting moves: diagnosed a front-end build issue on the hosting platform, then moved the WordPress back end to a new managed host, including media and comments, while the front end kept publishing.
• Weekly development: worked through a prioritized backlog in the Sun's own project-management and chat tools, including a most-popular widget, a dynamic menu, layout fixes across devices and fast responses to newsroom-critical issues.