Media and publishing, 2025
Warri Sentinel
A news website built to publish all day, for a fast-growing paper in the Niger Delta.
- Client
- WSentinel Media
- What we did
- Designed and built the platform
- How long it took
- 10 weeks
- See it live
- wsentinel.com
Warri Sentinel is an online newspaper from Nigeria's Niger Delta. In two years it grew into a name people know, covering news, events, lifestyle and sport. We built the website that carries all of it.
News platforms are a different engineering problem from marketing sites. Editorial velocity is high, traffic is spiky and unpredictable, readers arrive overwhelmingly on mobile over constrained networks, and revenue depends on how fast a page renders.
What made this hard.
Multiple verticals, news, events and lifestyle, and sport, had to live under one masthead without fragmenting the brand or the codebase.
Editors publish continuously. Any workflow friction compounds across dozens of stories a day.
Traffic arrives in spikes on breaking stories, on mobile, on networks that punish heavy pages.
How we approached it.
One masthead, many verticals
A shared section architecture lets each vertical carry its own identity, navigation and homepage rhythm while inheriting one component library, one type system and one performance budget.
Editorial speed as a design constraint
Article templates, embed handling and media pipelines were designed around what an editor actually does at 11pm on a breaking story, not around what looks good in a template gallery.
Built for the spike
Aggressive caching, image optimisation and a lean critical path keep article pages fast when a story breaks and traffic multiplies without warning.
Discovery by construction
Structured data, clean canonical URLs, fast paint and disciplined internal linking are built into the templates, so SEO and social distribution are properties of the system rather than a later retrofit.
What changed as a result.
Three verticals shipped under one masthead on a single shared platform.
A publishing workflow that keeps up with a continuously updating newsroom.
Article pages engineered for mobile-first readers on constrained connections.
- Publishing CMS
- Edge Caching
- Media Pipeline
- Structured Data
- Analytics