Dhaka Debates: from brand identity to Google News in eight weeks

How we did it

Ngital handled the project as one integrated build. The same team designed the brand, built the website and set up the SEO, so the identity, the templates and the search structure were planned together instead of being stitched together later.

1. Brand identity and guidelines

We started with the idea at the heart of the publication: a conversation about money. The mark is two speech bubbles, each a circle with one square corner pointing toward the other. Where the orange and ink bubbles overlap, the colours multiply, showing two views meeting in the middle.

The wordmark is set in Familjen Grotesk, with Gloock as the display face for headlines and the tagline, “Where Dhaka talks money.” The palette of Ink, Paper, Orange, Green and Sand gives the publication a warm, editorial feel that stands apart from the blue and green of most banking brands.

The full brand guidelines cover the mark’s construction, logo versions, clear space and minimum sizes, the colour palette, typography, misuse, app icons and favicons, and examples for article featured images and social posts. That gives the editorial team a ready system for every story they publish. See the brand identity guidelines on Behance.

2. Website design and development

Instead of adapting a ready-made news theme, we designed and built a custom WordPress theme from scratch, shaped around how people read and compare financial information:

• A newsroom-style homepage with a lead story, a trending list, a weekly reader debate and topic hubs for banking, remittance, the stock market, real estate and more.
• Long-form story pages with drop caps, pull quotes, an author box and a sources section, designed for comfortable reading on any screen. Stories are set in Newsreader, with Familjen Grotesk for the interface.
• Product review pages with scores, pros and cons, a sticky buy box and “Best of” rankings, plus ten colour-coded review series, from Card Review to Hidden Charges.
• Money calculators for loan EMIs, savings and remittance, so readers can run the numbers before they decide.
• A video section and a live rates page for exchange and savings rates in Bangladesh.
• AdSense-ready layouts that leave room for advertising without breaking the reading experience.

See the website and design system on Dribbble.

3. Technical SEO

The technical work was built into the theme rather than added afterwards with plugins. We set up:

• Clean, SEO-friendly URL structures for stories, reviews, videos and topic hubs
• Structured data for articles and product reviews, so review scores and article details can appear in search results
• Google News support, including news-ready sitemaps and article markup
• Fast, mobile-first templates with optimised images and minimal scripts
• Correct canonical tags, indexing rules and XML sitemaps across every content type

4. On-page SEO and E-E-A-T

For every story and review, we set an on-page standard the editorial team follows: keyword-focused but natural titles, unique meta titles and descriptions, descriptive SEO-friendly slugs, and internal links between related stories so readers and Google can move through each topic.

Because finance content is judged so strictly, we made trust visible across the whole site. Each article carries an author box and a list of sources. Supporting pages explain how the publication works, including Editorial Standards, How We Review Products, a Corrections Policy, an Affiliate Disclosure, an Advertising Policy, About Us and Our Team. These are the pages Google’s quality guidelines look for when deciding whether a finance publisher can be trusted.

What made it work

• One team, one plan. Brand, design, development and SEO were handled together, so every template was built with search and the brand in mind.
• SEO before content. The technical foundation was in place before the first story went live, so every article was indexable and well structured from day one.
• Trust as a feature. Author boxes, sources, editorial policies and review methodology were designed into the site rather than added as an afterthought.