Scalable infrastructure for complex news websites

Today’s news websites are more than just digital platforms that deliver up-to-date news articles. They incorporate multimedia such as live streaming, video, and audio, for content like weather updates, lifestyle, entertainment, and sports sections, to cater to a broad audience.

The complexity of these platforms presents website architects and developers with unique challenges. You’ve got to troubleshoot content localization, integration with external sources like APIs and media services, and managing roles and permissions for content creators.

In this article, we’ll discuss the architecture and components necessary for a robust news website, and consider some of the unique challenges involved. We’ll wrap up with some solutions for overcoming those challenges so you can build a successful news site.

#What are the components of a news website?

News websites cater to a wider range of topics, but there are several components that are essential to creating a successful site no matter your publishing focus.

Live component

A live news component gives users access to updates in real-time. It’s a critical part of any modern news website, especially if your audience includes political analysts, sports fans, or financial traders.

Your live news component may comprise various subsections, such as live streaming for important events; a ticker with updates on developing stories; and breaking news alerts. The underlying architecture may also require integration with a video player for live streaming, a streaming server and CDN to deliver video content, and a chat system to enable live interaction with users.

Weather component

The weather component of a news website should provide accurate and up-to-date information on the weather in a user’s area. Travelers, outdoor event planners, and businesses that need to plan around adverse weather events will rely on this piece of your site heavily.

A news platform’s weather component typically includes a weather forecast, radar and satellite imagery, and severe weather alerts. These features may require integration with plugins or services that provide current, localized data for temperature and forecasts.

Entertainment news

Entertainment news is extremely popular content on any news platform, for everyone from fans to studios to labels. If you want to provide the latest reports and commentary about celebrities, music, movies, and TV shows, you’ll most likely have to integrate with news feeds, syndication services, and social media APIs.

Lifestyle

Lifestyle news can be a broad area, covering healthy living, the latest health trends, wellness, fashion advice, recipes and nutrition, and travel tips, among other topics. Thanks to the breadth of available content, you can get especially creative in your platform’s lifestyle section, with subcomponents such as health and fitness tracking plugins, recipe databases, and travel booking services.

Sports

Sports news is right up there with entertainment news, but it deserves its own mention in this article. Sports fans want the latest news on their favorite teams and players, so the sports component of your site should cover everything from amateur to professional sports across football, basketball, hockey, volleyball, and soccer, just to name the big ones. Don’t forget that businesses in the sports industry keep up with the latest sports news as well in order to make sound business decisions.

To provide users with up-to-date news, scores, and statistics related to various sports and teams, you’ll need to integrate with services that provide live scores and statistics, team and player profiles, and betting and odds data.

#What are the challenges of building a news website?

As we’ve already mentioned, creating a news publishing platform can come with several unique challenges, like content localization, integration with external sources, and managing permissions. Now consider that you most likely want to solve those problems for diverse audiences across diverse platforms and devices, and you can appreciate that you’ll have a lot going on.

Here are some specific challenges to keep in mind and make sure you have a plan for addressing.

Handling localization

Content in different languages can be a huge management challenge for websites that target an international audience. Not only do you have to translate content into multiple languages, but you also need to ensure that the content you’re providing resonates in their language and culture.

That means optimizing all aspects of your news platform, including design, navigation, and formatting, for the target region. Your audience will keep coming back for content that’s customized to different cultural norms and preferences.

Integrating information from different resources

Providing up-to-date information on a wide range of topics requires accessing, gathering, and integrating data from several sources such as news wires, social media, and user-generated content. This can often involve using multiple APIs to provide varying functionalities and features including weather, social media, news, and analytics.

When integrating multiple APIs on a website, there are several challenges that may arise. Technical compatibility, performance, security, and maintenance issues can make it difficult to ensure that all APIs are working together seamlessly, are safe from security threats, and are operating at optimal levels.

Data visualization and analytics

Data visualization and analytics capabilities enable users to find and analyze relevant information quickly. Intuitive data visualization tools, such as charts, graphs, and maps, help users understand complex data, useful if you’re covering particularly niche or industry news. You’ll want analytics capabilities to track user behavior, measure engagement, and optimize content.

Your news platform’s architecture should allow for easy integration with tools for visualizations, analytics, and user behavior and engagement. Tools should be user-friendly and provide a seamless user experience across different devices and platforms.

Managing roles and permissions for content creators

A mature news website will have multiple contributors—editors, journalists, photographers, and readers—and they’ll all have varying roles and responsibilities. Managing user roles and permissions can become challenging as your site evolves.

Your site’s architecture must implement a robust user management system to handle user roles and permissions. And it’s got to do that while ensuring data security and privacy.

Developers need to ensure that each user has the appropriate level of access to the site's content and functionality based on their role and permissions. Access control mechanisms such as role-based access control (RBAC) can help you manage user access effectively.

#How can Hygraph help you build a successful news website?

A headless content management system (CMS), like Hygraph can help address some of the challenges that come with building a complex news website.

Customize for your needs

Traditional CMSs are typically out-of-the-box solutions with tightly coupled front and backends that limit users to the provided features, templates, and styles. In contrast, headless CMSs such as Hygraph offer more flexibility. They decouple the frontend of the website from the backend. Developers can then build the website using any framework, tech stack, or programming language.

Travel Weekly, a leading UK-based travel and hospitality publishing website, turned to Hygraph’s headless CMS when they wanted to change their content management approach. Their existing traditional CMS was too inflexible and difficult to maintain with several versions scattered across projects. Hygraph’s no-code schema builder gave Travel Weekly’s development teams the flexibility to build content models that precisely met their project requirements with very little onboarding.

Content localization

Localization is a core Hygraph feature that automates content localization to make it more manageable. Teams can define multiple locales for a project, publish content to one or more locals, and manage them easily through the Hygraph UI or the mutations API.

Internationalization (i18n) also allows for global content distribution and customization to match local customs and processes.

With Hygraph's auto-generated mutations or custom mutations, developers can mutate localized content for creating, updating, inserting, or deleting content. The localization mutation permissions enable granular permissions for locales on mutations.

Easy setup of external data sources

With Hygraph’s remote sources, teams can merge and unify different types of data from multiple APIs and web services into a single remote source. A remote source allows data to be sourced from external sources into a single content entry point for reduced complexity and greater flexibility. For example, in the travel subsection of your lifestyle news component, remote sources could integrate flight, hotel, and car rental information from several providers.

Teams can also query data from multiple sources, including REST APIs and databases, without requiring additional backend modifications. This allows developers to pull and integrate data from external sources into the CMS quickly.

Easy integration with other media platforms

Hygraph provides several ready-to-use integrations as apps for digital asset management; headless commerce and e-commerce; hosting and deployment; localization; personalization and AB testing; search and discovery; single sign-on; and more. In this case, apps are like UI extensions, integrations, and plugins that give you the power to integrate familiar tools and services into your content workflow. This means you’ve extended your project functionality.

Currently available apps and integration include Cloudinary, BigCommerce, Shopify, Netlify, Vercel, Lokalise, and Google Workspace. Developers can also integrate with third-party tools and services, such as marketing automation, analytics, and personalization tools, via an API.

Leverage the use of permissions and roles

A complex news website requires different users and departments to manage the different aspects of the site. With Hygraph Roles & Permissions, you can provide the appropriate levels of access to team members including editors, contributors, and developers.

Hygraph provides default systems roles as well as custom roles and permissions, so you can set user access according to your specific business needs. Custom roles and permissions enable you to create roles and assign permissions based on the functionality you require without exposing the user to features or areas of the website they don’t need to access.

#Conclusion

Managing a complex news website is no simple task, especially if you cater to diverse audiences and handle multiple locales. But with effective strategies and tools for content localization, integration, and user access management, you can create a flexible, easy-to-manage news website. Hygraph’s native GraphQL headless CMS can help you overcome these challenges.

Hygraph’s federated content platform allows development teams to unify, structure, enrich, and distribute content from anywhere to anywhere using a universal and powerful GraphQL API. Its low-code approach makes it easy to integrate all content sources. Empower your content team with a clean and collaborative content management UI so they can enjoy complete control over their content pipeline. From content development to deployment, you’ll notice improved efficiency, scalability, and optimized costs for your projects with Hygraph.