Magazine site with a subscribers-only section
The website of a Dutch outdoor magazine: six sections, a shop with two prices for everything, and a login that turned a reader into a subscriber. Built in Drupal in 2012; the site is gone.
Salt was a Dutch magazine about an active and adventurous life: trail running, mountain biking, an autumn table in Carinthia, a film about downhill skateboarding. Six issues a year for €22,50. In 2012 I built its website in Drupal. The site has since been taken down and the code has not survived, so what follows is what the home page shows on Friday 19 December 2014, and what can be read off it.
A magazine that wanted subscribers, not visitors
The brief was not a blog with a shop attached. The magazine sold subscriptions, and everything on the page pushed a reader towards one. The current issue sits top left with its price. The right column opens with a welcome, then a login box for existing subscribers, then a box listing what a subscriber gets: six issues, the newsletter, a discount in the shop, exclusive downloads, exclusive prize draws. The weekly newsletter had items only subscribers could read. Even the download of an interview with Reinhold Messner, at the bottom of the column, was a reason to log in.
So the account was the product. A subscriber logged in with an e-mail address and a password and got a profile they could edit, cheaper prices in the shop, and the downloads. A reader without one saw the same pages with the higher price and a prompt. That is one site with one set of content and two audiences, which is what Drupal's roles and permissions do out of the box: a subscriber is a user with a role, and every block, price and download checks for it.
Two prices on every product
The shop shows it plainly. A Deuter wash bag is €10,00 for subscribers and €15,00 for everyone else; a single issue is €5,00 and a trial pack €8,00, both priced for non-subscribers only. Each product carried both prices and showed both, so a reader could see what a subscription would save them before they had one, and the role on their account decided which one they paid. There was no separate shop for members; the same product page served both.
Six sections, each with a feed
The editorial side was six sections: Actief, Design, Reizen, Routes, Filmtips and SaltLab. Each one on the home page is a lead photograph, a teaser and five recent headlines, and each has its own RSS icon, so a reader who only cared about routes could follow routes alone. The sidebar linked out to the things that were not articles: stockists, downloads, frequently asked questions, Salt TV and Salt Apps.
There was an app as well, which is what the Salt Apps link led to. I no longer have it and I could find no trace of it in the app stores, so I cannot say more about it than that it existed.
What the page was made of
The layout was a three-column Drupal theme: a narrow left column for the issue and the site links, a wide middle for the sections and the store, a right column for the membership boxes, the newsletter form and the banners. Promotional banners had fixed slots, a tall one on the left under the site links and a stack on the right, most of them for the shop's own products. The header was a full-width photograph under a dated masthead, and the search box sat in the breadcrumb bar.
Two years after launch, the day the screenshot was taken, the site was still on the same structure, with the November/December 2014 issue in the store.
