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OJR article: WSJ's $28 Million Renovation
"So why completely overhaul a Web site that works? And what on earth or online accounted for the $28 million price tag being bandied about?"
What do you folks think? Improvement? Nice but not 28mil nice? Or worth every penny?
Being that the site was running on 1996 software, it had a ton of archived information (years of daily articles from WSJ, Dow Jones Newswire, Press Releases, Barrons, and other info on every industry) to incorporate into the new setup (verify metadata and correlate appropriately), needed hardware, needed software, had about a one year timeline, and CMS of most any type is a long painful task to modify to suit the needs; $28 million is not too far off. The site utterly flies now. Information on any public company around the world is at your fingertips and annotated. Sure google can find popular information, but Google can not add the context like the WSJ. The context, which is built through solid information structuring, metadata, and cross-correlating is very nice.
How much has Amazon spent in the last five years to build a solid world-class system that provides similar contextual information? Most likely much more. The WSJ has had a solid system before, but the scaling of the system over time began to show strain (this is just from a user's perspective and knowing what happens behind the scenes at a large site with a ton of data). The Journal really had not upgraded the system too much since '96. They added search, but the volume of information made the site relatively slow. A one year implimentation is a heady task and to bite off the large chunk that the WSJ did.
Being that the site was running on 1996 software, it had a ton of archived information (years of daily articles from WSJ, Dow Jones Newswire, Press Releases, Barrons, and other info on every industry) to incorporate into the new setup (verify metadata and correlate appropriately), needed hardware, needed software, had about a one year timeline, and CMS of most any type is a long painful task to modify to suit the needs; $28 million is not too far off. The site utterly flies now. Information on any public company around the world is at your fingertips and annotated. Sure google can find popular information, but Google can not add the context like the WSJ. The context, which is built through solid information structuring, metadata, and cross-correlating is very nice.
How much has Amazon spent in the last five years to build a solid world-class system that provides similar contextual information? Most likely much more. The WSJ has had a solid system before, but the scaling of the system over time began to show strain (this is just from a user's perspective and knowing what happens behind the scenes at a large site with a ton of data). The Journal really had not upgraded the system too much since '96. They added search, but the volume of information made the site relatively slow. A one year implimentation is a heady task and to bite off the large chunk that the WSJ did.
There may also be a degree of prestige in the pricing. The WSJ wouldn't want to be seen by their primary market as cutting corners on costings.
Part of the 28 M must have gone towards the re-design of the print edition. Yesterday marked the first change to the WSJ front page since 1942. According to thier article the plan is to phase in further changes throughout the next couple of months.
NPR's coverage: http://search1.npr.org/opt/collections/torched/me/data_me/seg_141362.htm
$232 million was spent on the new printer and also the print redesign. The $28 mill covered software and hardware too, which more than likely included a SAN (looking at 2 to 3 mil. easily and if it is redundant double that. Installation and intgration with testing double that number). Keep in mind the Dow Jones properties creates and archives approximately a few hundered to a few thousand articles and press releases each day.