expertenReport

experten.de is the trade portal of experten-netzwerk GmbH from Leipzig: news from the insurance and finance industry, written by an editorial team and complemented by contributions from the expert network. A portal with many sections, topic hubs, its own calculators and a digital newsstand. So not a website, but an operation that publishes content every day.

The site was built from scratch in a new environment on the CMS of Deutrik GmbH. No bought theme: I built the template myself, in XSLT against the system's data structure. Layout, typography, navigation, article and overview views. Plus the pages that make a trade portal and that no standard theme brings along: sections and topic hubs, the calculators, subscriptions, media data and the newsstand.

What counts is what comes after. The editorial team keeps working as before, and new sections get their look from the template instead of from handwork. A portal of this size can't live with a site you have to touch for every exception.

Then there was the advertising. A trade portal is funded by ads, and ads don't sit next to the text, they sit inside it. I set up the ad slots and built an algorithm that distributes them within the article: not at fixed positions, but by text length and spacing. A short piece gets fewer slots than a long feature, no slot sits directly after a subheading, and there's always enough text between two ads that nobody scrolls through a block of advertising. That takes the decision off the editors: they write, and the slots find their place.