News Portal Development: The Tasalli in 10 Languages

The Tasalli calls itself an "Editorial Intelligence Platform": a news site that uses AI to help curate stories from India and around the world. It wanted a portal that could compete for readers' attention against large media houses — without a large media house's budget.

News websites are hard to build well. The brief had to cover a long list of needs at once:

1. Many languages. India reads news in many languages. The site needed to serve English, Hindi, Bengali, Marathi, Gujarati, Tamil, Telugu, Kannada, Urdu and Arabic — including right-to-left text for Urdu and Arabic.
2. Many sections. Breaking News, State, National, International, Sports, Crime, Religion, Entertainment, Politics, Health, Technology, AI, Business, World and more. Each needs its own page and its own feed.
3. Speed. News readers leave a slow page in seconds, and Google's news surfaces reward fast sites. Images had to be light and pages had to load quickly on mobile data.
4. Ways to bring readers back. A one-time visitor is worth little to a news site. It needed email briefings, push alerts and an app-like experience.
5. Search engine visibility. A news site lives or dies on Google. Clean URLs, a sitemap and RSS feeds were not optional.

Why not use a news theme?#

Ready-made news themes look fine in a demo, but they struggle with ten languages, slow down as the article count grows, and are hard to extend with features like AI curation and e-paper pages. The Tasalli needed a portal built for its own workflow.

We built a custom news portal designed for speed, many languages and returning readers.

Content structure#

• 18+ sections covering breaking news, state and national news, international, sports, crime, religion, entertainment, politics, health, technology, AI, business and world.
• Utility pages readers come back to daily: Weather Report, Stock Report and Cricket Score.
• An E-Paper section for readers who like the newspaper layout.
• Search across all articles.

Ten languages, done properly#

Readers can switch between ten languages. Urdu and Arabic display right-to-left, with the layout flipped to match. Each language version has its own URLs, which helps Google show the right version to the right reader.

Built for speed#

• Images are served in WebP, a modern format that is much smaller than JPEG at the same quality.
• Media files are organised in a dedicated storage area so they can be cached well.
• Article URLs combine a readable slug with a short unique code, so links stay stable even if a headline is edited.

Bringing readers back#

• Daily Briefing — a free email newsletter.
• Enable Alerts — browser push notifications for breaking news.
• Install App — the site is a Progressive Web App (PWA), so readers can add it to their home screen and open it like an app, without an app store download.
• RSS feeds for readers and aggregators who prefer feeds.
• Reader accounts for a more personal experience.

Made for search engines#

• An automatic sitemap.xml so new articles are found by Google quickly.
• Clean, readable URLs per article and section.
• Proper legal pages — About, Disclaimer, Privacy Policy, Terms and Contact — which news platforms and ad networks expect.

Decisions that mattered#

• PWA instead of a separate app. One codebase serves the website and the "app", which keeps cost down and updates instant.
• WebP everywhere. On a news site with thousands of photos, image weight is the biggest speed factor.
• Languages as first-class sections. Not a translate button, but proper language versions that search engines can index.

What other publishers can take from this#

A news portal does not need a huge team to look and feel professional. It needs fast pages, clear sections, and good reasons for readers to come back tomorrow. Those three things drove every part of this build.

Planning a news or content site? See our Laravel development service and SEO service, or talk to us.