Case Study - Portal Development
Application: Web portal for Aupairs and FamiliesIndustry: Aupair
Aim: To develop a web portal where aupairs and nannies can meet families from around the world and communicate with each other for potential employment.
Background: The client contacted us after a bad experience with two other Indian web developers. With the website gaining popularity with over 30,000 registered users, the holes in the previous version of the website had started showing. The request by the users to improve the website were increasing by the day. We sought out the issues and re-developed the old website with a completely new approach. This project came as a challenge to us due to the following reasons:
- Language barrier, German client
- Lack of knowledge of client's area of work
- Importing data of over 30,000 users from the old database
Challenges:
The client wanted a truly multi-lingual cms to
The client wanted a truly multi-lingual cms to
a) enable them to add any new language option to the site on their own
b) enable true multi-lingual versions for better performance on country specific search engines
The other big challenge was to ensure that the site search was quick and that the pages loaded super fast even when there were 1000's of concurrent users.
Objectives: The development process was carried forward by keeping the following key points in mind:
- To design a feature rich and user-friendly website
- To design a database with in such a way so that previous database could be easily mapped-out
- Reducing the 'Time Delivery' of the new version
- To develop a user interactive website design
The team set about designing the database in a way such that the fields of the previous version of the database could be easily mapped and the information already gathered by existing users need not be entered again. Some of the fields were directly mapped, and some required combination of more than one field to derive their value.
The site also made use of feature-rich and industry proven open source software, reducing on clients cost and reducing the delivery-time of the new version. The new version developed by us as a result of improved programming and user-interface optimization is much more effective and flexible, offering complete muti-lingual search on the search engines.
Technical Background:
- Technologies Used:
PHP and MySql on the server-side - Operating Systems Used:
Linux for deployment
Windows for employment
Features: The following are some of the features that the website provides the various types of users - admin, agents, families, aupairs and nannies:
- Agent Registration - The agents registered with aupair.com can implement a multi-lingual version of aupair.com on their website.
- Profile Sharing- The agents can share profiles with their partners in other countries, who could then decide on displaying these profiles on their own website. This whole module is designed in such a manner, that both, the agent and his/her partner just need 2-3 mouse-clicks to manage this whole process.
- Multi-language translations - Aupair.com website manager can add a new language anytime by providing translations in that language.
- Internal Messaging system – The website also offers 'Send a message' service to its users. An au pair can send a message to the applicable family that he/she is interested.
- Hotlist Creation – The user can create a list of the families he/she is interseted in and can mark it as a hotlist. Once the user adds a family onto the list, the family automatically gets an email confirmation of the same.
- Contact the family – There are chat rooms developed in the website for the registered members. Once the user is a member of the website, he/she can contact the interested families for further discussion.
- Find a family – Once the user is signed in, he/she can search for the families through quick search option.
- Payment Gateway Integration - Paypal & Worldpay have been integrated into the website design for easy payment solutions on hand.
