SWNS Media Group

SWNS Media Group is a UK independent news and content agency based in Bristol, supplying content to publishers across the industry through Rocks, its content licensing and distribution platform. Every day, that platform has to handle huge volumes of live content - news copy, images, and video - moving at the pace a news business demands.

Giant Digital inherited Rocks rather than building it, and the platform underneath was struggling under its own complexity: built on a microservice architecture that made even small new features expensive to produce, since every change had to be replicated across services rather than made once.

This wasn't a simple content site, it was a high-volume, high-stakes distribution platform serving external clients and internal editorial, sales, and finance teams at once, and the architecture beneath it hadn't kept pace with what the business needed it to do.

On top of that, the front end itself had become cluttered and hard to navigate, meaning clients often downloaded far more content than they actually needed, simply because previewing it properly wasn't possible.

The first job was stabilising the platform itself. We refactored Rocks from its over-engineered microservice architecture into a single, well-structured monolith, built with Python - removing the need to replicate every new feature across multiple services and unlocking the ability to actually improve the product, not just maintain it.

With a stable foundation in place, we rebuilt the client-facing UI, stripping back unnecessary complexity, surfacing features that had been buried in sub-menus, and introducing a consistent design system across buttons, tables, and pages, cascading all the way through to admin screens. Built with Tailwind, it gives genuine consistency across a large volume of templates rather than the drift that often creeps in across a platform this size.

Rolling out changes safely mattered as much as building them. The new UI was released behind feature flags by permission group, so internal teams could use and test it before external clients ever saw it. A novel ad-hoc environments setup let smaller engineering tasks deploy alongside larger feature work, so day-to-day fixes and major builds could run in parallel without disrupting existing functionality - a genuinely rare capability for a platform under this much continuous demand.

Both the platform refactor and the new client UI launched smoothly, backed by weeks of thorough internal and client testing on both sides.

With the architecture stabilised, new features could finally be built once and produced everywhere, rather than replicated across services every time something changed - turning a platform that was becoming harder to maintain into one built to actually evolve. The refreshed client UI meant customers could find and preview content properly for the first time, cutting down on the unnecessary downloads that had been happening simply because the old interface didn't let people see what they needed before committing to it.

SWNS themselves described reaching this point as a 'watershed moment for the business' - proof that solving the platform's underlying complexity had a real, felt impact on the day-to-day experience of everyone using it.