Florida Politics

In 2013, Peter Schorsch began blogging about local elections in his home of St. Petersburg, Florida. At that time, the site was known as SaintPetersBlog. Today, after covering Florida’s political process for years, Florida Politics has grown into the leading news source for Florida’s political process.

Florida Politics is a unique site with a variety of challenges, needs, and exposure. As the beacon of information on Florida’s political process, performance is critical. Florida Politics is a WordPress based site with several custom features, such as a built in advertising platform and premium site security.

On two separate occasions, Daniel Dean redesigned the entire Florida Politics site. On both occasions, the site was redesigned to follow the latest trends in layout and usability. The news team publishes more than 40 separate posts each weekday, which means the site must be designed to show a large amount of information in an easy to follow manner, so as not to overwhelm the user.

Being the leading political news website in the 3rd largest state in the U.S., Florida Politics faces unique challenges. Before several different days each year, the site must be prepped for potential cyber attacks. Some of these attacks have been sophisticated and have originated out of country. At the same time, the site has needed to withstand bursts of traffic following breaking news, the legislative session, and elections.

Finally, the site needed to be optimized for search engines and news aggregation sites, such as Google News, as well as social networks to ensure maximum reach of content. Efforts here have ensured Florida Politics is prominently placed across the internet.