Media & News Web Development Services
Publishing has changed more in the last five years than in the two decades before it, and most legacy systems weren't built for the way readers actually find, consume, and pay for news today. Big Human handles news website development, editorial CMS architecture, and paywall engineering for media outlets, newsrooms, and publishing brands that need their tech to keep pace with their editorial ambition. We've been designing and engineering digital products for 15+ years, and we partner with publishers of every size, from single-newsroom flagships to multi-brand publishing networks, to build platforms that scale with their audience. From breaking news on the homepage to a 20-year archive in the basement, we develop it all.
Rockefeller Center
Delivering holistic innovation to an NYC landmark
Building Editorial-First Web Platforms for Media & News Brands
Publishing has its own physics. A platform built for a marketing site or a corporate brand will buckle the first time a story 10x's its traffic, an editor needs to push a breaking-news update at 11 pm, or when you try to migrate a 20-year archive without losing your search engine ranking. Big Human builds news platforms designed for the way publishers actually work: editorial workflow, then monetization, performance, and everything else. We architect for mobile responsiveness, real-time speed, scalability, and the user experience that decides whether a loyal audience comes back tomorrow. Whether you're a local news startup or a multi-brand publishing network, we develop platforms that scale with your audience.
Media & News Web Development Case Study
Rockefeller Center is a destination, a workplace, and a 90-year-old cultural institution. The team at parent company Tishman Speyer wanted The Center Magazine, its editorial property, to feel like all three. Big Human revamped The Center Magazine and its companion newsletter to elevate the brand, entice visitors, and raise excitement around on-campus happenings. The platform pairs an editor-friendly publishing experience with a reader-first front-end designed for long-form journalism, programming announcements, and shareable storytelling. Our work spans strategy, UX/UI design, and full-stack development on a single connected stack, and we've stayed on as Tishman Speyer's long-term platform partner since 2021.
What Our Clients Are Saying
"Big Human has delivered exceptional work in terms of content, design, and development. Their multi-channel strategy has helped to connect all of Rockefeller Center's offerings under one seamless digital identity, resulting in a website supported by smart, engaging content."
Cristina Tsanas, Marketing Director at Tishman Speyer
Content Strategy
Your platform only does as much as the content running through it. Big Human's content strategy work helps publishers define what their audience comes back for, how editorial maps to growth, and which formats earn the loyal audience worth building a paywall around.
SEO/AEO
Our SEO and AEO work helps publishers earn search visibility in both traditional search engines and AI-driven answer engines, so the audience you've built actually finds the stories you've spent time and money producing.
Our News & Media Publishing Web Development Capabilities
Custom Publishing Platform Development
Off-the-shelf news platforms get you 70% of the way and stop. We build custom news portals when the template ceiling is the actual problem: when your editorial model, your monetization mix, or the functionality your team needs day-to-day can't be served by a generic configuration. Every part of the stack, from the backend to the front-end, is designed around how your team publishes and how your readers actually move through news stories. The goal isn't a custom platform for its own sake. It's a platform that disappears so the journalism doesn't have to compete with the tool.
Editorial CMS Architecture & Workflow Tools
A content management system is the single most-used piece of software in any newsroom, which means its usability compounds every day. We architect editorial CMS workflows around the way your reporters, editors, and producers actually work: drafting, embargoing, scheduling, multimedia handling, version control, and approvals. The result is a user-friendly authoring experience that streamlines the path from pitch to published.
Subscription, Paywall & Membership Systems
Monetization is no longer an afterthought layered onto a news site. It's part of the platform's core architecture. We design subscription models, metered paywalls, registration walls, and membership tiers that match your audience's actual behavior. That includes the data plumbing: identity, entitlements, billing, churn signals, and the analytics it takes to actually optimize conversion. Subscribers should feel like they're getting exclusive content worth paying for.
Performance, SEO/AEO & High-Traffic Optimization
A news site lives and dies by two things: how fast it loads and how well it ranks. We optimize publishing platforms for real-time traffic spikes (the breaking news moment when a story 10x's an hour) and for the SEO and AEO fundamentals that bring readers in from search engines and AI answer engines the rest of the time. That means edge caching, structured data, Core Web Vitals, mobile-friendly rendering, and a search posture that survives every CMS update. Performance isn't a launch milestone. It's a discipline.
Our Media & Publishing Web Development Process
Publishing platforms are living systems. They ingest content every day, take traffic spikes without warning, and earn their value over years. Our process is built to launch a platform that the editorial team trusts on day one and the engineering team can keep evolving for the next five years. That means we start with the people closest to the content: editors, producers, product owners. We map their workflow before we draw a single screen, and we keep them in the room through architecture, design, and build. It's how we've shipped platforms with media brands, cultural institutions, and consumer products over 15+ years.
Content Audit & Editorial Workflow Mapping
We start by understanding the content itself: formats, volume, cadence, and the editorial rhythm. We often shadow the editorial team to see how stories actually move through the system today. The audit becomes the brief: what the new platform needs to do, and what it can stop doing.
Platform Architecture & CMS Planning
Once we know the workflow, we architect the platform around it. That means choosing the right CMS approach, modeling content types for reuse, and planning the integration surface so newsletter, ad, analytics, and search tools all connect cleanly. The result is an architecture document the editorial team understands and the engineering team can build against.
UX Design, Prototyping & Reader Journey Design
Reader experience is the product. Our UX team handles website design from the homepage and section pages to the article template, subscription flow, and section-page taxonomy. We design as a single connected system rather than isolated screens. We prototype the reader journey early, test it with people who match your target audience, and iterate before the engineering team writes production code.
Development, QA & Launch
Build happens in tight loops between design and engineering. Our developers work in the front-end and backend in parallel (JavaScript, CSS, and the server-side stack), with QA running alongside. Launches for news platforms are weight-tested for traffic spikes, monitored for performance regressions, and rolled out with clear cutover plans for editors.
Ongoing Support, Performance & Iteration
If you want us to stay on after launch, we can. That includes performance monitoring, iteration on the platform, and the experimentation work (paywall offers, recirculation tuning, AEO testing) that keeps a publishing platform compounding value over time. We're happy to wrap on a defined scope or partner with you long-term — whichever fits your team.
Media, News and Publishing Web Development Expertise
Publishing covers a wide span, from a hyper-local news site with three reporters to a global outlet running 12 brands off a shared platform. We've worked across that range, and we adapt the approach to the publishing model in front of us.
Ad Operations & Sponsorship Tools
CMS Migration & Archive Preservation
Headless CMS Development & Integration
Newsletter & Email Platform Integration
Newsroom & Editorial Website Development
Multi-Site & Multi-Brand Publishing Networks
Tech & Tools We Specialize In
We work in the stack that fits the publication, not a fixed list we re-sell to every client. That said, the choices we make most often for media and publishing engagements cluster around a few proven layers.
Backend
Node.js, Python, and Go for the API and service layer; PHP when the CMS calls for it. We pick the backend language to match the platform's performance profile and the team that'll maintain it after launch.
Frontend
React, Next.js, and TypeScript for most builds, with JavaScript and CSS where the project benefits from a leaner stack. We optimize the front-end for Core Web Vitals from day one, because performance is part of the SEO/AEO story.
CMS Platforms
WordPress (still the right answer for many publishers, with the right plugins and a custom theme), Sanity, Contentful, Strapi, and headless WordPress where flexibility matters more than ecosystem. We help publishers pick the platform their team can actually run.
Database
PostgreSQL, MySQL, and MongoDB depending on content model and query patterns. For very large archives, we layer search infrastructure (Algolia, Elasticsearch) on top so historical content stays findable.
Cloud
AWS and Google Cloud for production hosting, with Cloudflare or Fastly at the edge for caching, CDN, and DDoS protection. We architect web hosting for scalability, meaning a 10x traffic spike on a breaking news story doesn't take the site down.
Subscription & Paywall
Piano, Pico, Stripe, Memberful, and custom-built systems for publishers whose model doesn't fit a vendor's defaults. We integrate identity, entitlements, billing, and analytics so the paywall is part of the platform rather than a separate product.
Why Partner With Big Human?
A lot of agencies will build you a news website. Most of them will treat it as a content site with extra plugins. Big Human treats publishing as its own discipline, with editorial workflow, monetization, performance, and audience strategy as first-class design problems. We've spent 15+ years building digital products across media, culture, commerce, and consumer brands. The throughline is that we design and engineer in the same room, we work as embedded partners rather than external vendors, and we stay long enough to see the platform pay off.
Editorial-First Approach to Platform Development
We don't design publishing platforms from the reader-facing side and retrofit the CMS later. We start with the editorial team. The reporters, editors, and producers who'll live in the tool every day are part of the full process, not a stakeholder check-in at the end.
Design & Engineering Under One Roof
Most agencies hand a design file to a separate engineering vendor and hope it survives the translation. We don't. Design and engineering sit on the same team here, which means the things that get cut in the build because they were impossible never get drawn in the first place, and the things that are possible actually ship.
15+ Years Building Digital Products
We've been doing this since before "responsive design" was a phrase anyone said out loud. That tenure shows up in the parts of a project that aren't glamorous: migration planning, analytics instrumentation, the boring durable choices that separate a platform that holds up from one that gets rebuilt in two years.
Platforms Built to Scale With Your Audience
Scalability isn't a checkbox we mention in a kickoff. It's an architectural choice we make in week one, and revisit consistently after launch. The platforms we build handle a quiet Tuesday morning and a breaking-news Friday afternoon.
Trusted by Media Brands & Publishers
We've shipped digital products for publishers, newsrooms, and editorial brands whose audiences are demanding and whose tolerance for downtime is zero. Media work earns trust by showing up under load, and we have.
Award-Winning Design & Engineering Teams
The work has been recognized — Webbys, Communication Arts, Awwwards — but the awards aren't the point. They're a signal that the craft holds up to outside review.
Long-Term Support, Iteration & Growth
We work on both defined projects and ongoing partnerships, and we'll structure the engagement around what your team actually needs. Some publishers want a focused build, hand-off, and a clean exit. Others want us on retainer to keep iterating on the platform after launch. We're flexible on both.
Our Work
News & Publishing Platforms Built for Scale
Big Human builds news and publishing platforms that handle editorial workload, traffic spikes, and the monetization model your team is actually running. We partner with you on the platform decisions that shape the next five years of the business. Let's talk about your news website development project.
Ready to Build a Publishing Platform That Grows With You?
If your CMS is slowing your team down, your paywall isn't pulling its weight, or your archive is hemorrhaging SEO/AEO traffic, the next move isn't another patch — it's a platform built for how your newsroom actually works. We design and engineer publishing platforms with editors and engineers in the same room, and we can stay on as long-term partners after launch. From a single newsroom flagship to a multi-brand network, we develop it all, and we'd like to talk about yours.
