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Your Website Roadmap Is Outdated: Why You Need the RebelMouse Compass

Technology continues to accelerate the way we consume + interact with media. And while media companies are looking for a way to keep up with the times, they're following a roadmap that ultimately leads them nowhere. They're caught in a hamster wheel chasing these ever-changing trends.

What works within the social sphere changes constantly, not to mention fast. We've seen it with the recent big push to video, mobile's domination, paid subscription models, etc. But trends are fickle, and with the constant algorithm updates, platforms steal most of the spotlight — taking focus away from vital audience building and monetization on sites.

RebelMouse was built in the age of social, so we are well equipped to handle these disruptions. Our clients are seeing crazy results amidst the changing social landscape because we've mastered the right mix of strategy + tech to propel them into the future.

We'll Be Your Compass

Quite literally. We can point you in the right direction, and teach you how to navigate the changing media landscape. You may think you know how to follow the map, but you have the map for a world that no longer exists. You leveled up in Zelda and you keep losing because you don't know how anything works anymore. We are your new roadmap.

Our software is different, in that it's built to set you up for success before publish. We are a creative agency that doesn't leave you to navigate the waters alone. We have a team of experts to help with content strategy, important integrations, and thoughtful revenue building. We never let one of our clients fall behind. Instead, we keep them on the leading edge of what it means to be a publisher in 2017.

Data Nobody Else Has


We are inspired by intuition and gut, but compare everything against data — lots of it. As one of the few, if not only, creative agencies that has access to data across a ton of properties and media sites, we can better set up the next steps for our clients' growth.

When launching with RebelMouse, our clients are seeing numbers that leave industry standards in the dust. We worked with darling new media company Axios to create a next-gen, front-end experience. In the first three months after launch, Axios saw 40M+ page views and a bounce rate under 15%.

We also worked with Azula to modernize their website and propel it into the age of social. After leaving WordPress and launching with RebelMouse, Azula saw their Facebook traffic increase by 398%.

We Rock at Content Distribution

Recently, a ton of media companies that pivoted almost entirely to video are now seeing a decrease in page views. Firing editorial staff and focusing on one major platform and strategy has caused their traffic to tank.

At the same time, RebelMouse clients are watching their traffic soar. While other media companies are focusing on one sole strategy, RebelMouse knows the importance of distributing across all platforms, using the right mix of content, innovative editorial tools, and technology to reach max potential. Our Social UX for Media makes sites as viral and binge-worthy as the social feed. We've married websites with social media, and it's working.

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Particle Assembler: Ads in Slideshows Now Supported

You can now insert ads between slides in a slideshow!

Monetizing users' engagement and page views is pivotal to most digital businesses, and our Particle Assembler has been an invaluable tool in helping RebelMouse clients to insert native ads seamlessly into their content. Now we've taken this functionality one step further by introducing support for ads between slides in Assembler's slideshow layout.

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Inside RebelMouse’s Quality Assurance Operations

How We've Perfected Stress-Free Publishing

At RebelMouse, we like to refer to our enterprise publishing platform as "lean tech." Most publishers have a natural inclination to start doubling down on teams of developers who try to build unique experiences to help stand out above the noise. But they should actually be doing the opposite: Lean tech is the preferred way to cut through content saturation. By allowing RebelMouse to obsess over your product, content producers, editors, managers, and everyone in between can focus on creating quality content and taking advantage of opportunities to leverage distributive publishing strategies that create real revenue growth.

One of the major reasons we're able to maintain a lean tech environment is thanks to our approach to quality assurance (QA). We make updates to our platform daily to ensure our clients always have access to the most robust, high-performing, and secure version of our platform. Behind the scenes, this means having a solid QA structure that's efficient, creates less bugs, and catches the ones that do pop up before they go live. It's a system of checks and balances that's hard and costly to replicate on a custom CMS. Here's a glimpse into how it works.

Our Tech Stack Toolbox

  • Cucumber
  • Java
  • Junit
  • Maven
  • Selenium WebDriver
  • TeamCity
  • Zalenium (Selenium Grid)

Our Checks and Balances Workflow

Automated Regression Testing Cycle

The Lifecycle of a Product Update

When an update is first made to RebelMouse, TeamCity immediately triggers the start of automated tests to review integrity.

TeamCity Build

TeamCity Agent

The tests run in parallel on TeamCity's Build Agent. Next, Zalenium creates docker containers with browsers that matches the count of parallel threads. An Allure report is then generated from the test results, which shows the state of the application after the update.

Allure Report Pass

If a test doesn't complete successfully, the testing framework receives a video with a failed test and attaches it to the Allure report.

Allure Report Issue

Based on the report analysis, a QA specialist will create a "bug" ticket in our product management software to address the issue if needed. Then, information about the bug is immediately sent to the project manager and we begin the process of correcting the problem.

The media powerhouses we power can publish with confidence knowing that any product issues that arise are met with a tried-and-true process to fix the problem with little-to-no disturbance to their workflow. If you have any questions about this process, please email support@rebelmouse.com.

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The Difference Between Subdomains and Subfolders

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder.

If you're looking to have RebelMouse power only a portion of your site, you can set up either a subdomain or subfolder. This is a choice your team will have to make as you replatform and optimize your content, so it's important to understand the distinction between the two.

Subdomains

A subdomain is a subdivision of an existing domain: For example, apis.rebelmouse.com (subdomain of rebelmouse.com) and hub.united.com (subdomain of united.com) are both examples of subdomain structures. Launching a subdomain on RebelMouse is simple and straightforward for your tech team, and usually doesn't entail much extra work.

Subfolders

Creating a subfolder is a bit different. A subfolder is a URL structure such as FSAStore.com/learn. It's easier to think of subfolders as subsections of your site. This work generally takes about 10 service hours for our team to configure for you.

To launch a new property using a subfolder setup, RebelMouse provides you with technical strategy, direction, and advice on how to configure it properly. For search engine optimization purposes (SEO), using subfolders is the most optimal setup, but the SEO improvement can be minor. As long as the content on the main domain and subdomain interlink, there's not much to worry about if you need to use a subdomain setup. We accomplish the correct connections between both through JSON and feed integrations.

If you have any questions about the difference between subdomains and subfolders, email support@rebelmouse.com.

Related Posts vs. Posts in Assembler

Here's the difference between Related Posts and Posts in Assembler.

By using Related Posts and Posts in Assembler, you can help your audience stay engaged with your site's content and generate more traffic. Both of these features can be added to any post through Entry Editor.

When creating or editing a post, you can add a Related Posts section to the bottom of it that consists of a selection of existing posts on your site that you choose to surface. Only the main image and content headline are pulled, along with a link to the original post. This is similar to the Around the Web section that also shows up at the end of your post when you enable it from the SEO tab of Entry Editor.

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