Elevating Brands: Firecrown Media

Big news: Firecrown Media moved FLYING to a headless CMS and its exponentially faster and the UX is drastically improved. Firecrown, founded by Craig Fuller, is the largest media platform in aviation and recreational boating, whose business model is scaling via smart execution of the content-to-commerce model. 

To quote Firecrown Media's Chief Executive Officer, Craig Fuller: "We've moved FLYING to a headless CMS and its exponentially faster and the UX is drastically improved. We plan to move all 40+ of our media sites to the same headless platform, which will drastically improve speed and enable us to rapidly deploy new digital products."

Firecrown: Taking Enthusiasm for Aviation and Boating  to New Heights

Firecrown Media, a powerhouse behind over 30 website domains with millions of monthly pageviews (including flyingmag.com), recently announced a strategic partnership with a platform and headless CMS known for blazing speed and design flexibility. This collaboration promises to revolutionize the digital presence of Firecrown's vast online portfolio and propel the company further toward unicorn status.

Firecrown's stated business goal is to cultivate trust, influence, and commercial activity amongst aviation and boating enthusiasts. With a portfolio of high-traffic, unique brands and websites in their portfolio, the business opportunity is clear: create a technical structure and foundation that supports individual brands consistently wowing audiences with modern visual experiences, while remaining capable of generating audience growth via search, syndication, and re-circulation, and maximizing revenue via ads, affiliate, and analytics. 

Publishing Firecrown's content via headless CMS allows the company to deliver immediate, consistent, and long-term audience and earnings growth for Firecrown.

One of the key aspects is ensuring that digital experiences are not only visually appealing but also highly resilient to technical changes and algorithm updates from Big Tech (Alphabet, Meta, Atlassian). A Headless CMS empowers Firecrown to create websites that load quickly and efficiently, providing a seamless user experience, while remaining hyper-efficient at sharing data and information to earn traffic and recognition from referral sources, including — and especially — Big Tech. 

The Need for Website Speed and Design Excellence

In today's fast-paced world of digital consumption, speed is the ultimate predictor of website success. A faster-loading site opens the door for faster-loading ads and commerce content, which leads to higher view-ability rates, higher instances of ad refresh, and more clicks deeper into a website. Firecrown recognizes the need for websites that load quickly and deliver a seamless user experience.

But it's not just about speed. Design quality and brand personalization are equally important for attracting high-quality editorial talent. Firecrown understands the significance of visually appealing brand websites that create lasting impressions with the target audience. By partnering with a headless CMS, Firecrown can create stunning websites that reflect each brand's identity and captivate users.

(Under the hood, the WordPress backend is familiar for editors, writers, video producers, and content creators — there's no lag time required to teach people a new technology). 

The partnership between Firecrown and a headless CMS brings together the need for high-quality content and high-quality website experiences. Working together, the teams feel they'll be able to establish permanent value chains and value creation levers amongst aviation and boating enthusiasts.

Secret Sauce: Component-Based Design

At the core of Firecrown's digital strategy is its component-based design approach. This innovative methodology allows Firecrown to create websites that are not only visually appealing, but also highly scalable and flexible.

Firecrown can build custom sites that consist of independent, reusable elements. This modular approach simplifies the development process and ensures consistency and efficiency across multiple domains. 

Firecrown's needs include: 

• A tool for every need: From hero banners to contact forms, design library covers all essential website elements, saving Firecrown's developers countless hours of coding and design.

• • Uncompromising design: Each component is meticulously crafted to ensure pixel-perfect design, eliminating the need for custom development while maintaining brand consistency across the entire portfolio.

• Lightning-fast performance: architecture prioritizes speed, resulting in websites that load instantly, keeping users engaged and improving SEO ranking.

Results-Focus

The vision for results of the Firecrown is generating significant positive steps toward the goal KPIs, including increased and incremental revenue and significantly higher user engagement and satisfaction. 

A headless CMS drives improvements in:

• Engagement: Increased monthly pageviews, by as much as +14% to +24%
• Stickiness: Users spend more time on site, by as much as +21% to +30%
• Conversion: Bounce rates dropped +30% to +42.9% 
• Efficiency: Design and development time reduced by 30% compared to expectations, which come from the enhanced developer experience.
• Speed: Page load times decreased by 56%, with Google Lighthouse scores have going from red to exemplary green for all the sites on headless.
• Hosting: hosting infrastructure combines the benefits of AWS — for media storage, services, security infrastructure, and databases — and Fastly for caching, image optimization, edge computing, WAF, and uptime assurance. Also includes DevOps and site monitoring via various monitoring services including PagerDuty, Kingdom, Datadog, and Sentry.  

Beyond Speed: Innovation

Firecrown goes beyond speed and design excellence. It's trying to foster innovation and push the boundaries of what is possible for its audience. From implementing advanced functionalities to experimenting with emerging trends, Firecrown stays at the forefront of innovation:

• Experiment and iterate quickly: New ideas can be tested and implemented at lightning speed, fostering a culture of innovation.
• Adapt to changing needs: As Firecrown's business evolves, effortlessly adapt to accommodate new functionalities and website requirements.
• Embrace new technologies: The platform's open architecture allows for seamless integration with emerging technologies, keeping Firecrown at the forefront of the digital landscape.