"Our primary goal was to improve the stability of the back-end of our website without overhauling the front-end design our customers are used to," said Daniel Friend, marketing and media manager for The Texan. "BLOX Digital seemed like the perfect solution to the problems we were facing. And to our delight, the feedback from our subscribers has been minimal."
The Texan, a statewide political news organization based in Austin, Texas, was founded in 2019 by Konni Burton. In addition to daily content, The Texan also produces a weekly podcast, exclusive video interviews, the Texas Partisan Index and much more.
"BLOX Digital helped us make the change at a pace we were comfortable with and that aligned well with the lull in the news cycle of Texas politics."
The Texan originally launched as a small publication with a WordPress site and a paywall connected to Stripe. The paper focused resources on its growing reporting team, and relied largely on technical support limited to third-party developers.
"Because of the site's complexity, it became very fragile whenever we wanted to make changes or upgrades," said Friend. "With WordPress, we needed to maintain a complicated system of plugins in order to keep everything running smoothly."
After The Texan experienced technical issues with the site, the team began looking for a new CMS. This led The Texan to move to BLOX Digital in 2023.
"With BLOX Digital, we were able to start fresh with a new content management system (BLOX CMS), bring over all of our existing content with a similar look and feel, and migrate our subscriptions to the new system while continuing to use Stripe."
Because continuity for subscribers was a top priority, The Texan was able to maintain its Stripe integration through BLOX Audience+ and BLOX Pay with Premium Credit Card Management.
BLOX Audience+ helps to eliminate unnecessary friction by allowing readers to immediately see the best subscription options available, enter their payment information and create an account, and get back to reading without ever leaving the article page.
With the previous WordPress subscription plugin, The Texan was extremely limited in what it could present to prospective customers with the paywall.
"To customize anything required diving deep through layers of code," Friend said. "I am much happier with the paywall we have now. BLOX Audience+ presents all of the offers we want to highlight — essentially replicating our main subscription page — and we can tailor it more specifically to the customer viewing the article."
"One of the main advantages that drew us to BLOX Digital is their experience working with news organizations and the subscription business model," Friend said. "We knew that with this background, they would understand our specific business needs and have features tailored to those needs."
The Texan also found significant value in BLOX Digital's robust technical support. With a dedicated customer support team and access to after-hours critical care, The Texan is confident in its ability to receive assistance for any urgent needs.
"Transitioning to BLOX Digital has exceeded my expectations," Friend said. "It not only addressed our immediate needs of a stable CMS and readily available technical support, but BLOX Audience+ also significantly improved our subscription and payment process to reduce friction for customers. We're looking forward to utilizing more of BLOX Digital's features to produce compelling content and continue keeping Texans informed."
For more information, visit https://www.bloxdigital.com.
