Capital IQ Powermoves was a WordPress-driven financial industry news blog operated by Standard & Poor's Capital IQ, a financial data and analytics division of S&P Global. The project was a focused technical engagement to improve the site's back-end performance and extend its functionality, completed while working at DSM.
The original WordPress theme had been built by another developer, and the project involved taking ownership of that existing codebase and making targeted improvements. The primary performance issue addressed was in the category and tag taxonomy system, which had become bloated or poorly structured, affecting query efficiency for a content-heavy blog. Streamlining this system required auditing and restructuring the taxonomy without disrupting existing URLs or content relationships.
A caching layer was implemented to improve front-end delivery performance for a publication site that handles regular publishing activity and reader traffic. For a financial news site where content timeliness matters, caching strategy needs to balance performance with the need for content freshness.
A custom functionality addition was also developed: search links attached to custom fields for individuals mentioned in each post. This allowed readers to navigate from a post directly to filtered content related to the people or companies referenced, a useful discovery mechanism for a financial news context where coverage of specific executives, analysts, or institutions is ongoing across multiple articles.
