The Challenge

Build a WordPress portal that serves two purposes — a blog platform for health and pharmaceutical articles, and a digital archive for a print magazine with 20 years of history. The key technical challenge was making full magazine issues browsable directly in the browser, without forcing users to download large PDF files or wait for an entire issue to load before they could start reading.

Custom PDF Viewer

Built a custom in-browser PDF viewer that renders magazine issues as a page-by-page reading experience. The viewer uses lazy loading to only render the current page and one page ahead — keeping bandwidth usage low and load times fast, even for issues with 28+ pages of high-resolution content. Navigation includes page-by-page browsing, grid view for quick overview, zoom controls, and a sharing option. A fallback link to the raw PDF is provided for users who prefer to download or read externally.

WordPress Theme & Customisation

Customised the WordPress theme to match the client's brand and content needs — blog post templates, category organisation, magazine archive pages, and custom fields for issue metadata. Wrote custom code where the theme's defaults fell short, ensuring the client could manage all content — articles, issues, images — through the WordPress admin without developer involvement.

SEO Optimisation

Implemented on-page SEO across the site — meta tags, structured headings, image optimisation, clean URL structures, and sitemap configuration. For a content-heavy site with hundreds of articles and dozens of magazine issues, proper SEO structure was essential to make the archive discoverable through search.

Results

  • Custom PDF viewer with lazy-loaded page rendering
  • Full magazine archive browsable in-browser without downloads
  • WordPress CMS — client manages all content independently
  • SEO optimised for discoverability across hundreds of articles
  • Site live atㅤ apoteka-magazin.rs