The Score Africa: Rebuilding the Website for an Entertainment Business Publication

SCORE, published at thescoreafrica.com, covers the business and culture of African entertainment: film, television, music, theatre, technology and gaming. MediaWura rebuilt its website. This case study explains what a publication's website has to do, what the rebuilt site does, and the decisions behind it.

The core idea is simple. A news site is judged article by article. Most readers never see the homepage; they arrive on one story from Google, a shared link or an AI answer. So the rebuild treats every article page as a front door.

Who is SCORE?

SCORE describes itself as a source for entertainment business news and creative culture across Africa. It is part of Premier 369 Entertainment, the same group as the communications agency PR369, and its founder is Philippa Bentuma Arthur.

Its coverage goes beyond celebrity news. Recent stories cover a national music campaign, a West African action film slate, the role of African film festivals, and what rising console prices mean for African gamers. The audience it describes is creators, executives, brands and entertainment fans across Africa and the diaspora.

What does a publication's website need to do?

A publication's website has to make a large and growing archive easy to browse, make each article fast and pleasant to read, and help every story get found, shared and trusted.

On top of that, SCORE's site has jobs beyond reading. It needs to attract advertisers, recruit contributors, receive confidential tips and build a subscriber relationship. Each of those is a different visitor with a different goal, and the site has to serve all of them without cluttering the reading experience.

A rebuild adds one more requirement that a brand-new site does not have: existing articles have to come across intact, because a publication's archive is its credibility.

You can see the rebuilt site at thescoreafrica.com.

What MediaWura rebuilt

MediaWura rebuilt SCORE as a full magazine-style news site with organised sections, article pages built for reading and sharing, business pages for advertisers, writers and tipsters, and the technical groundwork search engines expect from a publisher.

Sections that match how the industry is organised

The main menu runs across Film, TV, Music, Theatre, Technology and Gaming, Features, Global, What To Watch, What To Listen, Intel and Festivals. Each section opens into sub-sections that reflect how people in the industry think: box office, business, reviews and trailers under Film; audience and streaming under TV; awards, live reviews and music for screen under Music.

That structure lets a film distributor go straight to film business coverage, while a casual reader can head for What To Watch.

A homepage that leads with stories

The homepage leads with the latest stories as large image-led cards, then moves into section rows and a Popular list. It is built to look like a publication, not a company brochure, because that is what readers expect from a news brand.

Article pages built for reading and sharing

Each article page carries the story, its category, author and date, share buttons for Facebook, X and LinkedIn, tags, links to the previous and next article, and a "Related to this topic" block that keeps readers moving through the archive. Readers can leave comments.

A dark mode toggle sits in the header, and a search box lets readers find any story by keyword.

The archive carried across

The rebuilt site holds SCORE's existing articles and images, imported into the new system, so earlier coverage stays available under the new design rather than disappearing in the move.

Pages for advertisers, writers and tipsters

The footer links to dedicated pages: About, Contact (with a contact form), Got a Tip, Advertise, Write for Us and Subscribe. Each page speaks to one audience. The Write for Us page sets out what SCORE looks for and how to pitch. The tips page explains what counts as a tip and how to send one confidentially. The Advertise page sets out who reads SCORE and how to start a partnership conversation.

A route to the newsletter

SCORE's commentary newsletter, Unfiltered, runs on Substack. Rather than rebuild a newsletter system, the site promotes Unfiltered on the homepage and gives it its own page that sends readers straight to subscribe.

The decisions behind the rebuild

The rebuild was shaped by three facts about how people find and read news now: they arrive on single articles, they read on phones, and search engines and AI assistants decide which stories they see.

Why the technical SEO matters so much for a publisher

Each article page tells search engines exactly what it is. Articles carry news article structured data with the headline, image, publish date, author and publisher, plus canonical tags and social sharing details. The site publishes separate sitemaps for pages, posts, categories and news, including a news sitemap in the format Google uses for news content, and an RSS feed.

For a publisher, this is the difference between a story being picked up quickly and a story sitting unnoticed. It also gives AI assistants clean, consistent information about who published what and when. We explain the wider picture in how to get recommended by ChatGPT and schema markup for small businesses.

Why the business pages are separate

Mixing advertising details, writer guidelines and a tips line into one "Contact" page would bury all three. Separate pages let SCORE send an agency, a freelance critic or a source one link that answers their questions. They also make the business side of the publication visible to anyone assessing it as a partner.

Why reading comes first on phones

On a phone, the header collapses to a menu button and the logo, and stories fill the screen. Article pages lead with the image and a short summary in larger type, so a reader knows what the piece is about before committing to it. Share buttons sit with the article, where a reader who has just finished a piece is most likely to pass it on. See why website speed matters on Ghanaian mobile data for the reasoning behind keeping pages light.

What SCORE can do with it now

SCORE now has a website built to run as a working publication.

• Publish across clearly organised sections and sub-sections.
• Give every article the structured data and sitemaps search engines expect from a news publisher.
• Keep readers moving through related stories and the archive.
• Send advertisers, contributors and sources to a page written for them.
• Grow its Substack readership from the main site.

The same group's agency, PR369, also had its new website built by MediaWura. Read how we built PR369's website.

Common questions

How long does it take to rebuild a news or content website?

It depends on the size of the archive, how clean the existing content is, and how many sections and features the new site needs. MediaWura gives a timeline in writing after a free audit of your current site.

Will we lose our old articles in a rebuild?

They should not be lost. Planning how existing content and images move to the new system is part of the job, and it is one of the first things we look at in an audit.

How much does a website rebuild cost?

Every rebuild is scoped differently, so MediaWura quotes a fixed fee in writing after a free audit. You see the full cost before any work begins.

Does a new website help us show up in Google and AI answers?

A well-built site gives search engines and AI assistants clear, structured information to work with, but nobody can promise rankings. What a rebuild can do is remove the technical problems that hold good content back. See our guide to SEO, GEO and AEO.

If your publication or content business has outgrown its website, see our website design service or book a free strategy call and we will look at your current site first.