Zegarki i Pasja: a watch portal and its community, developed with us non-stop since 2016
Zegarki i Pasja is a Polish watch portal with news, reviews, tests, video reviews and quizzes, run from Katowice by its owner and editor-in-chief, Maciej Kopyto. Online since 2014, it celebrated its tenth anniversary in 2024, and from 2017 to 2022 it also published a free print quarterly: 19 issues, 375,000 copies in total. We have developed the portal with its team since 2016, without a break, and we are now building its next version.
working together without a break
front ends rebuilt from scratch, with a third on the way
of small projects, from a new section to a same-day fix
a new backend for everything that came after
The challenge
A portal that lives on its community and on search has to keep moving: new formats, from video reviews to quizzes, more readers on phones, and search engines that reward fast, well-structured pages.
A one-off build would have aged within a year, so the portal needed a team that stays.
What we built
- The whole front end, rebuilt twice, each time for faster pages and an easier read on phones.
- A new backend in 2021, the base for everything that came after.
- A community of its own: a system for user accounts with profiles, posts and follows, like a small Twitter for watch lovers.
- Personalization that runs all the time, with Firecrux CDP adapting what each reader sees.
- Features from login and the newsletter to premium banners, a watch glossary, video reviews and a timeline of how watch movements evolved.
How we work
- Ongoing work in monthly blocks of hours: hundreds of small projects, next to the big ones.
- Several big rounds of performance optimization, so the pages stay fast as the portal grows.
- SEO, from structured data for search to the structure of articles and reviews.
- Help with data analysis: what readers read, where they come from and what brings them back.
Timeline
- 2014: the portal goes online.
- 2016: our work on the portal starts, in monthly blocks of hours.
- 2017-2022: the portal also publishes a free print quarterly, 19 issues in all.
- 2021: a new backend.
- 2024: the portal turns ten.
- Today: we are building the next version of the portal.