The Brief
013News is a digital news platform covering the Mpumalanga region of South Africa, publishing regional news and information across multiple categories. The platform needed to do what news platforms must do well: load fast, display content dynamically by category and recency, and hold up under traffic.
In 2016, RubyWeb – then operating as WeDev.Africa, the agency from which RubyWeb evolved – entered into a long-standing strategic partnership with MfisoMedia, the publisher behind 013News. The engagement covered complete design, development, and ongoing technical support for the platform. That partnership continues today.
The Challenge
A live news platform has requirements that differ from a standard business website. Content publishes continuously, traffic spikes unpredictably around breaking stories, and the reading experience needs to feel current and immediate. The site had to surface articles dynamically by category and show readers how recent content was – not just when it was published, but relative to now.
The dynamic category and timestamp requirements turned out to be more technically complex than a standard WordPress implementation could handle out of the box. The category landing page alone required over 4,000 lines of custom code.
- Dynamic article rendering required by category and publication date - no standard WordPress template could handle the complexity
- Human-readable timestamps needed - displaying 'two hours ago' rather than a static date to improve freshness perception
- High-traffic resilience required - news sites spike unpredictably and the platform needed to hold up under pressure
- SEO foundation needed to ensure articles could be discovered by readers through search engines
- Ongoing maintenance was essential given the continuous publishing rhythm
- Mobile performance was critical for a readership increasingly accessing news on smartphones
Our Approach
We treated this as a publishing infrastructure project, not a standard web build. The category page architecture and dynamic timestamp logic were scoped and built as custom development from the start.
The long-term partnership model suited the nature of a live news platform. Rather than a defined project with a handover point, we built a continuous support and improvement relationship – handling bug fixes, plugin updates, performance monitoring, and design iterations as editorial needs evolved.
Architecture & UX Decisions
The category landing page was built with a fully custom architecture capable of dynamically sorting and displaying articles by category and time-since-published. The relative timestamp logic was implemented in a way that updated without requiring page rebuilds.
Category-based navigation was structured to help readers find relevant news quickly. SEO was integrated at the architecture level – schema markup, optimised metadata, structured URL hierarchies, and image alt text all built in from day one.
The Build
The core deliverable was a purpose-built WordPress news platform with fully custom category page architecture, dynamic timestamp logic, performance optimisation, and an SEO foundation built for ongoing publishing.
Key deliverables included:
- Custom WordPress news platform designed and built for publishing speed and editorial ease of use
- Fully custom category landing page – 4,000+ lines of bespoke code for dynamic article sorting
- Human-readable relative timestamps – ‘two hours ago’, ‘three days ago’ – implemented site-wide
- Category-based navigation structure for intuitive reader access to relevant news
- Schema markup for news articles, metadata configuration, and structured URL hierarchies
- Advanced caching, lazy loading, and image optimisation for fast load times
- Core Web Vitals monitoring and continuous improvement
- Long-term technical support – bug fixes, plugin updates, performance enhancements
- Design iterations and new content section additions in collaboration with the MfisoMedia editorial team
The Outcome
013News evolved into a reliable, high-performing news destination for readers across Mpumalanga. The custom platform handled the dynamic publishing requirements that standard WordPress could not, and the long-term partnership model meant the platform improved continuously.
On-page SEO improvements helped the site rank for local and regional news topics in search engines. The dynamic article loading and relative timestamps improved reader engagement.