Open Country Mag is the brainchild of Otosirieze Obi-Young, former deputy editor of Brittle Paper and winner of the inaugural The Future Awards Africa Prize for Literature. We’d previously worked with Otosirieze on his personal website, which we inherited from another designer, cleaned up for malware, and fixed visibility issues. With Open Country Mag, he wanted to “curate cultural journalism and publish essential, in-depth stories in African literature.”

The Challenge

Open Country Mag wanted a complete rebuild of its website based on the masterful blueprint created by Emeka Ugwu, the magazine’s art director.

• Change the entire website layout without losing any original content, comments, or ranking.
• Design more than 70 templates to deliver different content types and styles. 
• Deliver the project in less than a month.  

Here’s what we did:

• We designed 15+ individual page templates and 50+ unique website sections.
• We rebuilt the entire website from the ground up while preserving stats, search ranking, and content for more than 150 posts. 
• We took great care with the website architecture to boost visibility in search and ensure that the important stories covered by Open Country Mag’s brilliant team of writers could be found by readers.
• We continue to provide support, updates, and website maintenance. The website has passed 100,000 visits, thanks to the excellent work of Otosirieze and his team.