VanFLIP is a satire news publication in the vein of The Betoota Advocate, The Onion and Clickhole. We designed the look and feel, then built a custom publishing and social distribution layer over WordPress: stories publish to the site and out to Facebook and Instagram in one move, and an AI reel studio turns each story into social-ready video, quotes and carousels.
A joke has about an hour
VanFLIP wanted to do for the internet what The Betoota Advocate, The Onion and Clickhole do for their corners of it. Satire lives or dies on distribution, and almost all of that is social. A piece is worth the most in its first hour and close to nothing by the next morning. So the site needed a look that reads on a phone, a publishing process that doesn't make an author wait, and search foundations that keep pulling readers in months after the joke has cooled.
Design and honest SEO
We designed the brand and front-end from the masthead down: a clean news look tuned for quick reading and heavy social referral. The SEO went into the templates rather than getting bolted on later, with sensible structure, metadata and schema so stories rank on their merits. No keyword stuffing, no doorway pages, none of the tricks that work for six months and then cost you the site.
One screen, three places
On top of the standard WordPress editor we built a custom publishing layer. From one screen an author publishes to the site and pushes the story to Facebook and Instagram, through an integration layer we wrote to handle the cross-posting. No copying links between four tabs while the moment passes.
The AI reel studio
We also built a reel product for Instagram and TikTok. It summarises a story into a short script tuned for social, then premium AI voice models add the narration, and what comes out is ready to post. Authors can fire reels off programmatically or build them by hand, and the same studio produces quote cards and carousels, so one article goes out as several pieces of media without anyone rewriting it four times.
Build notes
- A custom front-end and masthead designed for a satire newsroom, built for fast reading and the heavy social referral these sites live on.
- Ethical SEO built into the templates: clean structure, metadata and schema that earn search traffic on merit rather than through tricks.
- A publishing layer over the standard WordPress editor that posts a story to the site and shares it to Facebook and Instagram in one move.
- A social integration layer we built to handle the cross-posting, so authors do not juggle separate apps and logins to get a story out.
- An AI reel studio that summarises a story into a bite-sized, social-optimised reel for Instagram and TikTok, with premium AI voice models adding spoken narration.
- Rich media beyond video (quotes, carousels and more) that can be published programmatically or by hand, so one story ships in several formats.
