News Portal Development for European Media Agency

Robust news portal with enhanced editorial tools for managing frequently updated dynamic web content
Scalable architecture ensuring that the portal stands peak loads
Consistent user experience powered by well-thought UI/UX design and high performance
Powerful content localization capabilities for fast and convenient extraction of media data to publish

Expertise

Content & Document Management

Web & Enterprise Portals

Verticals

Media & Entertainment

Rishi Software Services(RSS) rebuilt the web portal of a large European news agency that delivers up-to-date information and analytics about politics, economics, and culture to a worldwide audience.

Duration

Months

Efforts

Person-months

Context
Challenge
Solution
Results

Context

The Customer is one of the leading European media agencies.

The Customer’s news website provides the latest news covering a variety of topics such as politics, economy, international news, culture, and expert opinions. Media content is backed by multiple images, audio and video files.

The Customer was looking for news portal development services to remaster the existing website in line with updated requirements. Iflexion’s solid expertise in web portal development empowered by strong software architecting skills convinced the Customer to entrust this project to our team selecting it among a number of software development companies.

Challenge

The Customer’s news portal is accessible to the audience across different countries standing about 150,000 hits per hour at load peaks.

Their legacy website could barely handle this load, so the Customer needed a new robust solution able to support high visitor traffic.

Outdated website design was another problem, as well as the legacy CMS system that didn't answer the needs of news editors.

The Customer wanted their news portal to look and feel up to the expectations of today’s demanding audience. The admin panel was to provide content managers posting online news on the website with all necessary features while making their job easier.

Key requirements:

Performance

The main architectural challenge was to ensure the portal remains accessible for the audience standing 150,000 hits per hour at load peaks with acceptable hardware requirements.

UI/UX

The UI/UX of a new solution was to encourage the visitors to choose the Customer as their primary media source.

Editorial tools

The news portal required enhanced tools for managing frequently updated dynamic news content. The editorial tools were to support complex metadata management, review and approval workflows, publishing rules management, on-the-fly media content ingestions, etc.

Integration

The Customer uses centralized digital asset repository serving as a source for illustrations and audio/video content. So the solution had to support fast and convenient location and extraction of such media for publishing on the portal.

Solution

Iflexion’s team completely overhauled the online news portal. The delivered solution boasts high performance, rich back-end functionality for editors, and content-centric front end with outstanding UI/UX design.

Key deliverables:

Highly scalable architecture.

Rishi Software Services(RSS) designed a highly scalable multi-tier architecture with Oracle database cluster supplying data for multiple application and front-end servers with effective load balancing applied. The architecture ensures that the website will stand high load even during peak hours.

To enable quick and easy content search, the team used the Sphinx search server.

Top-notch UI/UX.

The website’s design is tailored for a busy business audience that wants to find and read interesting materials as quickly and easily as possible. The right balance of available functionality and usability ensures high visitor engagement.

Tailored web CMS.

Rishi Software Services(RSS) developed a custom content management system (CMS) with enhanced editorial tools. The PHP-based solution provides only required functionality with features arranged in an order from the most to the least used. This approach ensures that the Customer’s employees find the CMS practical and convenient to use.

The CMS is integrated with the Customer’s new media repository (see below). This allows for quick embedding of necessary media files (images, videos, audios, etc.).

Rich media libraries.

Media content storage was added to the portal to provide quick and easy access to audio and visual materials.

User subscription module.

Each user can become a registered member of the Customer’s community and select a suitable subscription plan.

Results

The Customer was satisfied with RSS's news portal development services.

The new website helped the Customer to maintain their reputation as a trusted and always up-to-date media source providing the latest news on various topics.

The updated architecture ensured the website’s stable performance even under peak loads. The news portal with thousands of hits per hour now can stand even higher traffic.

The completely remastered design increased visitor engagement. Now, visiting and navigating the Customer’s portal is as easy and pleasant as reading your favorite offline magazine, but with audio and video embedded.

The Customer’s employees met the new tailor-made CMS with enthusiasm as it significantly facilitated their working routine. In fact, the portal’s content management engine proved to be so successful that the Customer decided to launch one more project with Rishi Software Services(RSS) – an online discussion club Valdai based on the same engine.

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