The Hook: Introduction and Context

EatUp Nigeria had been using Medium as their primary platform for sharing brand stories, company updates, and engaging with their audience. However, while Medium is a powerful tool, it lacked the personalization and branding opportunities that EatUp needed to truly connect with their target audience. To take control of their narrative, improve audience engagement, and create a platform designed specifically for their brand and users, we set out to build a custom blog platform that would provide a more immersive and branded experience for EatUp’s customers and stakeholders.

Inorder to build a stronger online presence and enhance brand recognition, EatUp needed a platform where they could fully control content and branding, engage directly with their audience, optimize SEO for better discoverability, and funnel traffic to their website rather than an external platform. By creating a custom blog platform, EatUp could now manage their content in a way that aligns with their business goals while providing an improved experience for their audience.

The Journey: Development Process & Challenges

The goal was to create a visually appealing, easy to use, and SEO optimized blog platform that would allow EatUp’s team to seamlessly publish and manage content. The platform needed to support rich media content (images, videos, and embedded elements),feature an intuitive content management system (CMS) for non technical users, ensure fast loading times and mobile responsiveness.

We experienced some road blocks such as moving existing Medium articles to the new platform required a structured approach to maintain SEO rankings, and ensuring a smooth reading experience while keeping the UI aligned with EatUp’s brand identity. To address these, we developed a seamless import tool to migrate existing blog content while preserving SEO value, and designed a user friendly interface with a focus on readability and accessibility.

The Build: Technical Implementation & Stack

To ensure the platform was scalable, secure, and high performing, we selected the following technologies: Frontend, JavaScript with EJS (for dynamic templating and flexibility); Backend, Node.js with Express (to manage content and user interactions);Database, MongoDB (for flexible and scalable data storage); Authentication, JWT (for secure user login and session management).

The key features and functionality are full control over the look and feel of the blog, ensure better search visibility, optimized for all devices, social sharing options and allow users to subscribe and receive content updates.

The Outcome: Results & Impact

This will give the company 100% control over content and branding, improved SEO rankings and organic traffic, higher engagement through structured content organization, better content discoverability through structured categories and tags, seamless content management for EatUp’s marketing team, thereby creating a brand centric blogging experience. Some of the lessons learnt in this project are; building a CMS from scratch requires careful planning to balance usability and functionality, and EJS with JavaScript offers a lightweight and effective way to manage dynamic content.

Demo Video

The Future: Next Steps & Reflections

The blog updated version will allow users to add comments, and likes, while the front end will be built on Next.js to enhance SEO, performance, and overall user experience, and also enables multiple team members to contribute and manage content seamlessly.By continuously improving the platform, EatUp’s blog will remain a powerful tool for brand storytelling, audience engagement, and business growth.

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