Website creation for an independent online magazine: DoYouSpeakLondon, from WordPress to Ghost

Client

DoYouSpeakLondon — an independent UK lifestyle magazine founded and written by Valérie Lorain Broca, covering London's hidden gems, restaurants, museums, parks, pubs, afternoon teas and seasonal guides, with editorial reach across England, Scotland and Wales. Its line: London, curated by a local.

Industry

Media and publishing — an independent online magazine funded by editorial partnerships

Services provided

• WordPress to Ghost CMS migration of the full archive
• Managed Ghost CMS hosting
• An editorial taxonomy designed for a browsable magazine
• Newsletter set up on the publisher's own list
• A rate-card page for brand collaborations
• Client training and ongoing support

Project objective

DoYouSpeakLondon was a WordPress blog with a real audience and a real archive. It was not a hobby that needed tidying up — it was a publication that had outgrown the platform it was standing on.

Three objectives:

1. Move the whole archive without losing it. 173 articles, every one photographed and written by hand, with the images that belong to them.
2. Turn a blog into a magazine. A reverse-chronological feed is fine for news. A city guide is consulted, not read once — a visitor arrives wanting pubs, or afternoon tea, or Scotland, and needs to land there in one click.
3. Make it earn. An independent publisher with an engaged readership has something to sell. She needed a site that made that offer legible to brands.

The challenge

• Migrating 173 articles with their media library, keeping the URLs that already ranked
• Designing navigation for a publication with six distinct editorial worlds, without a menu that collapses under its own weight
• Owning the audience directly rather than renting it from a social platform
• Leaving a solo publisher — writer, photographer and editor in one person — completely self-sufficient

Solutions implemented

The migration, done properly

The full WordPress archive moved to Ghost: posts, images, tags and authors. The media library came across intact — the original photographs are still served from the site, under their migrated paths, which is exactly what you want when the images are the product.

We kept the existing URLs where they carried search visibility, and redirected the rest rather than leaving dead ends behind. A migration that costs a publisher their rankings isn't a migration, it's a relaunch.

A taxonomy built for browsing, not scrolling

This is the part that makes it a magazine rather than a blog. The navigation is organised into six editorial worlds, each one a real entry point:

• Explore London — hidden gems, neighbourhood guides, museums and exhibitions, parks and gardens
• Food — restaurants, pubs, hotel breakfasts, afternoon teas, bakeries and cafés, bars
• London by Seasons — spring, summer, autumn, winter
• Things to Do — jazz clubs, fun experiences, shopping
• UK Travel — England, Scotland, Wales
• My Services — about, and collaborations

Each of those is a live tag page, so every article files itself into several of them at once. A piece on a rooftop bar sits under Bars, London and Summer simultaneously, and gets found from all three. The archive stops being a pile and becomes a structure — which is as good for search as it is for readers.

Site-wide search, a light/dark theme and progressive loading of the archive complete the reading experience.

A newsletter she owns

The free weekly newsletter runs on Ghost's native membership system: subscribers are collected on the site, stored in the publisher's own database, and emailed from her own domain. No third-party list, no platform that can change its terms or its reach next quarter.

For an independent media outlet, this is the single most valuable asset on the site. Social platforms lend you an audience. A subscriber list is yours.

Monetisation made explicit

Most independent publishers monetise badly, not because the audience isn't there but because nothing on the site tells a brand how to buy. So the site carries a proper Collaborations page — a media kit, in effect — with the offer stated openly:

• sponsored feature articles from £150, typically £150–£500 depending on scope;
• featured listing placements inside curated guides from £75, typically £75–£250;
• multi-venue editorial guides for hospitality groups and tourism boards, priced on brief.

It also states what is included — editorial write-up, structured storytelling, category placement, up to two contextual backlinks, scheduled publication — and the optional extras: Instagram promotion, a newsletter spotlight, professional photography, featured placement.

And it states the editorial rule: every review comes from a genuine visit, and generic promotional copy is not published. That sentence is not decoration. It is what makes the inventory worth buying, and it's why this model holds up where a banner farm doesn't.

Running a publication that deserves to earn? Book a free 30-minute video call — no commitment, and we'll look at your archive and your monetisation together.

A step-by-step approach

1️⃣ Archive audit — 173 articles, their media, their tags and their URLs inventoried before anything moved.

2️⃣ Migration to Ghost — content and media library imported, URLs preserved, redirects in place for the rest.

3️⃣ Editorial architecture — the six worlds built as navigable tag hierarchies, with featured posts on the homepage.

4️⃣ Newsletter and membership — subscription set up on the publisher's own domain and list.

5️⃣ Monetisation and training — the Collaborations rate card published, then a working session on the editor.

What the client runs herself

Valérie writes, photographs, tags and publishes everything. New pieces appear several times a week, each one filed into the right worlds, with its own feature image and its own SEO-conscious slug.

She also runs her own commercial relationships: brands enquire through the site's contact form, and she handles the brief, the visit and the publication. We are not in that loop, by design. We host, maintain, back up and support. The magazine is hers.

Conclusion

The interesting part of this project is not the WordPress migration — it's what the migration made possible.

A solo publisher now has a structured, searchable magazine on infrastructure she doesn't maintain, an audience she owns through her own newsletter, and a published rate card that turns editorial credibility into revenue. That is a viable independent media business, run by one person, on a platform that costs a fraction of what the equivalent WordPress stack costs to keep alive.

If you are writing well and earning nothing, the missing piece is usually not talent. It's structure — and a page that tells brands what to buy.

Publishing a magazine, a guide or a newsletter?

Let's talk — a free 30-minute video call, no commitment. We build and host sites for independent media and journalists, migrations included.

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