Rebuilding and Rebranding the APA Publishing Blog
A live editorial property was migrated and rebranded on WordPress without an interruption to the publishing schedule.
Situation
APA Publishing's editorial blog serves the audiences around APA's research databases: institutional librarians, faculty, students, and individual subscribers. It publishes product updates, training material, and search guidance, and it functions as both a support channel and a marketing channel for the database portfolio.
Two things happened at once. APA had rolled out a new organizational brand identity developed by an outside agency, and every property would need to adopt it. And the blog itself needed to work harder — as a resource librarians could use, and as a channel that supported the products commercially.
I owned the design, branding, layout, navigation, and content structure. The publishing division was the first department at APA to implement the new brand identity.
The site is live at blog.apapubs.org.
Constraints
The property could not go dark. The blog was publishing on a cadence to an established audience, and it had indexed content with existing search equity. The work had to happen underneath a live site.
The brand system came from outside. An agency guide defined the identity — color bands, typography, visual language — but a brand guide specifies an identity, not its implementation. It did not describe how the system should behave inside a WordPress magazine theme, or what a contributor should do at 4pm on a publishing day without design support.
The people applying it are not designers. Contributors are subject-matter staff. Any system requiring design judgment on each post would drift within months.
Approach
Audience segmentation as structure
The blog's categories are defined by audience rather than topic: For Librarians, For Faculty, For Students, For Individual Subscribers. Every post is filed by who it serves, and posts serving several audiences carry several categories.
This is the decision the rest of the site rests on. The same product update means different things to a librarian evaluating renewal and a student trying to finish a literature review, and a single undifferentiated feed serves neither. Segmenting at the taxonomy level means each audience has a filtered view of the property, reachable by URL, without duplicating content.
The segmentation sits in the post-acquisition phase of the customer lifecycle. Institutional access already exists; the job is making sure it gets used. The librarian is the one directing students and faculty to the right resource, so the audience categories function as a routing mechanism they can point people toward — not four separate audiences being marketed to in parallel. A librarian can send a faculty member to the faculty view and a student to the student view, and each arrives at material written for them.
That makes the taxonomy a support instrument with a commercial consequence. Usage drives renewal, and the librarian drives usage.
Creating the tutorial series
Tutorial Thursday was developed with input from APA's Customer Success team. Each installment features a video tutorial from the APA Publishing Training channel and carries a standing invitation for librarians to embed or link it in their own library websites, LibGuides, and course management systems.
The format solves three problems at once. It gives the blog a predictable cadence that does not depend on product news arriving on schedule. It gives contributors a repeatable structure to produce against. And it gives librarians redistributable material, which means APA content reaches end users through the librarian rather than around them.
The topics came from Customer Success — the team in direct contact with librarians and institutional subscribers. That sourcing is what makes the series work. An editorial calendar built in a marketing meeting produces content someone thought would be useful; a calendar built from what customers were actually asking produces content that answers a question already being asked. The series was demand-led rather than supply-led.
IMPLEMENTING THE BRAND SYSTEM
I worked inside the blog's existing structure and theme rather than rebuilding it, and applied the new identity to it. The content architecture already worked; rebuilding would have risked it for no gain.
The agency guide defined the identity. I defined how it operates on this property: how the brand fonts are used across headings, body, and captions, and how the color bands translate into a layout the theme could render.
THE HEADER TEMPLATE SYSTEM
The core artifacts were a set of branded header images: one per database product and one per recurring series. Roughly eight to ten templates in total, covering the portfolio and the editorial formats.
This is what made the implementation durable. A contributor selecting from a fixed set of headers cannot drift off-brand. A contributor asked to apply brand standards themselves eventually.
CONVERSION AND MEASUREMENT
The blog carries a subscription form that captures name, email, and institution, with explicit consent to product contact—a segmented list tied to institutional affiliation rather than an undifferentiated newsletter signup.
Google Tag Manager is deployed, and internal links carry structured UTM parameters across campaign, source, medium, content, and term.
Outcome
First department at APA to implement the new brand identity, setting the pattern other properties followed
No interruption to the publishing schedule through the transition
Audience-segmented taxonomy, header system, and tutorial series are all still in correct use today
Durability is the outcome that matters most here. Most brand and editorial systems decay within a year, because the rules live in the head of the person who built them. This one was built so the correct choice is the easy choice, and it has held for six years without me.
What this project demonstrates
Most platform and brand work is not greenfield. It is inheriting a live system with real users, real content, and real momentum, and improving it without breaking any of the three.
The test is not how it looks at launch. It is whether it is still correct years later, when the person who built it is gone, and the people using it never met them.
What followed
The blog implementation led directly to broader work: I was brought onto the librarian-facing pages on APA's main site and defined and directed the APA Librarian Promotional Toolkit — a co-marketing asset system for the same audience. That work is documented separately.