TV Studio History: Moving a television archive to WordPress and keeping it available
Digital archive · WordPress case study
TV Studio History: Moving a television archive to WordPress and keeping it available
Retired television lighting director Martin Kempton started TV Studio History in 2006. The site brings together his research, personal recollections, photographs and contributions from people who worked in British television. It remains a living archive, with readers invited to send corrections and additions.
The project at a glance
The challenge
The 2021 rebuild had to carry years of material over to a new platform. The challenge was to preserve long, detailed studio histories while giving readers a clear way to find them and leaving Martin able to continue editing the archive. A visitor might be looking for a particular ITV studio, researching BBC Television Centre or following a trail across several related pages. The structure needed to make sense in each case.
A typical reader may land on a studio history directly from a search engine and then want to find related studios or check the sources behind an account. The archive needed clear categories and reference pages for both routes. Categorising the old material as part of the move gave the individual studio histories a place in that wider structure.
What Ace Web Studio did
We migrated and categorised content from the old site, built the WordPress homepage and worked on templates for studio categories and individual studio pages. The live archive gives readers routes by studio group and location, with separate pages for the introduction, bibliography and contact details.
After launch
We stayed involved through recurring maintenance, a later hosting migration and troubleshooting as the site continued to evolve. One example was a report that links to the Introduction, Bibliography and other reference pages had disappeared from the navigation. Those pages are visible in the live menu today. With an archive, an issue like that matters: valuable material can still exist on the site and be much harder for readers to find.
The navigation issue shows what a useful support request looks like. Martin could name the links he expected to see and where they usually appeared, which gave the team a concrete starting point. That kind of follow-up sits alongside the larger technical work, such as changing hosting. Both matter on a site that still receives contributions and corrections years after its original launch.
How the archive is organised
The archive supports both browsing and research
The categories give a newcomer a way to explore by broadcaster or studio group. The bibliography serves a different purpose: it gives readers a place to look for the sources behind the histories. Keeping those routes easy to find helps people use the site both as a collection of stories and as a reference they can return to.
Preserving the routes readers rely on
Once readers are familiar with an archive, they often return to the same category or reference page. The report about the missing menu links showed how easily that habit can be disrupted. The later hosting move was a separate job, but the practical aim was similar: look after the website without making the archive harder for Martin to update or for readers to explore.
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