SmartHer News

SmartHer News is a non-partisan news source founded by a former Fox News anchor who left the network after disillusionment with how modern news fails to serve the modern woman. The platform was founded on the principle that “true empowerment is providing a woman solid information and then getting out of her way; she doesn't need to be told what to think”.

The philosophy is simple: Quality shows respect. True "empowerment" is providing a woman solid information and then getting out of her way. She doesn't need to be told what to think; She's smart. She just needs access to trustworthy information she can flip-through easily in a style that's convenient for her.

They had built a strong following on social media providing informational coverage of current events; unfortunately, changes to algorithms left the client panicked that their platform was at the mercy of social media search engines. They had a website, but it was an outdated Wordpress installation plagued by frequent crashes, a corrupted database, and poor publishing workflow.

All of these issues were further compounded by a tight budget. The founder feared monetization could lose the trust of the readers, so any solution needed to be low maintenance, fail gracefully, and be affordable to build.

When a story covering a hot topic lands, traffic can easily spike tenfold. The previous server often struggled under these loads.

By using static builds pushed to CDNs, this was entirely eliminated while keeping hosting costs dirt cheap. Of course, this leads to the issue of having to rebuild the site after every change, regardless of how small. This drove the decision to use Next.js due to its painless incremental static builds feature. This meant only the most recent stories need to be built at publish time, keeping update lag to only about 3 minutes.

Static builds also introduced a stability boost. Should a bug emerge in the build pipeline or an API service go down, the worst that would occur was the site wouldn’t update. This has provided continuous uptime since launch.

The client didn’t have the time or resources to pursue a custom CMS, so an existing solution was mandatory. Core selection criteria were:

• Headless, as the client may pursue an app or other use cases in the future.
• Must allow for building custom workflow tools and components. I didn’t want to rely on the trust that “batteries included” wouldn’t be restrictive.
• Open source. Should in the future the platform move to a custom CMS, shiny product features shouldn’t become proprietary handcuffs.
• The schema should be directly storable in a NOSQL database without any processing.
• Because the site would be static-built, there had to be a way to have exact previews of the live site.

In the end, I found Sanity best satisfied these requirements and allowed for building a custom scrum board to manage publishing reviews. Its React-based interface also meant components could be shared between the front and back end in its monorepo.

Additionally, Sanity’s extensibility allowed iframing live previews of articles during editing. This was implemented by having an auth token being provided by the CMS when a custom preview pane opens. This token is read by a serverless function, and sent to a request splitter. If the request is authorized, the requested page is generated via a client-side fetch, allowing immediate page updates on the website when a change is made in the CMS. If the request isn’t authorized, the static version is served.

Stripe’s subscription API allowed for an easy way to collect monthly contributions from readers without the overhead cost or SEO splitting that comes along with platforms like Linktree.

Because a large portion of SHN’s audience still uses Instagram as their primary contact point, the client needed a single link for their bio, allowing readers to quickly find the newest articles, newsletter signups, and contribution sign-ups. Avoiding the high profit split Linktree requires meant a sizeable monthly increase for SHN’s bottom line.

When the first edition of the site was built, the client needed it quickly, cheaply, and to assume no risks. Furthermore, they were uncertain exactly what their service would be once they moved away from social media, so they were clear, they wanted a generic product. This meant making conservative styling decisions and foregoing certain optimizations. They needed a reliable platform where they could find their voice.

Recently, they found a direction – the feed . Largely inspired by the success of the Linktree clone, this new version focuses on providing a continuous reading experience with expanding stories instead of redirects to article pages. This also allows for posting traditional articles, smaller content such as a link to an outside story, or complex content such as podcast episodes and videos all within a unified feed.