Insure.com Wordpress Blog
Launched in November of 2008 I Was responsible for all development. I worked with our IT Team, Marketing Team and Editorial Team to determine project delivery time line.
I joined Insure.com in January of 2008 where I was originally brought on as a help desk administrator. One of my tasks was to take Microsoft Word documents sent over from our Editorial team and to update our Website with the contents of the document. This required reformatting the content into Java Server Pages(JSP).
Due to the site architecture any file change required a full code deployment to our web server. The web server also contained our public facing Life Insurance Application. The deployment process was very methodical and had no margin for error. If a last minute came in the entire process would have to start from the beginning. It was not unusual (shout out Tom Jones) for a single article to take an entire week to be published.
When the IT team was looking into a stand-alone solution to manage editorial content on Insure.com I had suggested Wordpress as I was using it for a couple of personal projects at the time. It had document revision control, user roles and was easily customizable so the decision was made to move forward with Wordpress and I was tasked to lead the migration and development of the new Wordpress site.
I worked with the Editorial team to customize the content editing experience and trained them on how to manage their content. I Created custom Google Analytics reports for the marketing team and created custom document fields to manage SEO page data. The site had several 3rd party marketing tools that were also integrated into the site and managed through custom plugins that I developed.
The Editorial team was able to bring 30 years’ worth of Insurance content online and the marketing team had a new lead channel with a lower acquisition cost and higher conversion rates. The Insure.com branding, content and website were sold in October 2009 for $16 Million USD which was the most expensive acquisition of a single domain at the time and still ranks in the top 10 as of July 2020.
