Labiotech.eu - Europe’s leading biotech news site

Designed and built Europe’s leading biotech news site: a custom WordPress publishing platform, gated subscriber access, and the systems that turn readers into a qualified industry audience.

Labiotech is where the biotech industry reads. Daily news, in-depth analysis, podcasts, reports, and events, written for founders, scientists, investors, and pharma teams. The site has to look like a serious publication and work like a commercial product: easy to publish, ready for sponsors, and built to grow a list the business can actually use.

I designed and built it end to end. The front end is a custom WordPress theme, not a bought template. Editors publish from a block library made for the brand: story feeds, reports, callouts, partner placements, pull quotes, timelines, team pages, and hidden content. The homepage, mega menu, article templates, search, events calendar, and ad placements all sit in the same system, so news, sponsored work, and campaigns can run side by side without the site looking bolted together.

The product behind the articles is the audience. Premium stories sit behind a subscribe wall. Readers sign up with a business email, company, and job title, or continue with Microsoft or LinkedIn. I built the authentication API on Vercel: accounts in Postgres, secure sessions, Mailchimp double opt-in, and webhooks that keep subscription status in sync. The page someone signed up from is stored once and never overwritten. Referral codes stay put when someone updates their profile. Company names are matched against a top-pharma list, so the commercial team can see which subscribers come from the companies that matter.