Elasticsearch

Digital product scaling and team augmentation of a reputed online publishing company

admin — Tue, 10 Jan 2023 21:33:44 +0000

Digital product scaling and team augmentation of a reputed online publishing company admin Tue, 01/10/2023 - 21:33

Digital product scaling and team augmentation of a reputed online publishing company through effective DXP strategy & consulting

Online Publishing

USA, Canada

In depth CMS implementation, content moderation flow, advertisement module

Drupal 8

Domain Access Suite

Elasticsuite

Docker

Digital Ocean

Github

Confluence

The client is a reputed online publishing and business listing company. They were running sites with primitive proprietary CMSs and was facing increasing difficulty to maintain these websites. Particularly the three above mentioned websites were different versions of the same website as these are affiliate sites of the same parent company. There were three major focuses on the development - Ease of content editing, a very advanced advertising management feature and an impressive look and feel with interactive elements.

The website was running with primitive proprietary CMS and content editors were facing difficulty to maintain the content publishing to individual sub-sites. Particularly those websites were different versions of the same website (multisite) and were affiliated sites of the parent company.

Advance Content Management Features

The client wanted to have advanced content management features which shall be able to publish content in one or different sites (we call domains) by simply selecting while creating the content.

Detailed Content Flow

Also, there was supposed to be a detailed content flow wherein editors were able to create contents and submit for approval. Then an approver can go in make recommendations to the editors and this process can go on back and forth till all is good and the the publisher can go forward and publish the content to the site, at this point the content becomes actually visible to the end users.

Content Storage

Also each and every change made to a piece of content was to be stored as revisions. When required, publishers could revert back to an old revision.

Advanced Advertisement Module

There was an advanced advertisement module we created. The client had different 3rd party paid ads from various categories. Each of those ads had various tags. We needed to pull those ads which belongs to the ads in the present page being viewed and being able to be dynamically pulled in. So at a particular page, only the most relevant ads were supposed to be displayed.

We built a CMS with features like publishing content in different domains and implemented the facility where content can be stored as a revision and can be reverted back to old revision, advertising management feature, advanced advertisement module and an elegant look and feel with interactive elements. The website had different 3rd party paid ads from various categories where every ad had various tags. We required to pull those ads which belonged to the ads in the present page being viewed and being able to be dynamically pulled in. So at a particular page, only the most relevant ads were supposed to be displayed.

Storebrand Testimonial

Once you have found the product-market fit, it's time to scale up your product. By virtue of our team's extensive knowledge in digital product scaling, we were able to effectively assist the client to grow their online publishing platform into a mature product. Their team lacked technical expertise and knowledge and we were able to commission a dedicated development team for them in a matter of days, which helped them to achieve significant organic traffic growth, increase in customer retention and growth in advertisement revenues through our consulting & digital strategy.

2+ years of continuous development, ongoing support & maintenance

Storebrand Testimonial II

Cloud & DevOps

Continuous Monitoring

Digital Design & Branding

Enterprise Drupal Development

Incident Management

Minor Enhancements & Bug Fixes

Performance Optimization

Product Scaling

Support & Maintenance

Team Augmentation

UX Consulting & Audit

Web Development

Angular

Apache SOLR

Browserstack

Confluence

Docker

Drupal 8

Elasticsearch

GIT

Headless Drupal

JIRA

MySQL

Postman

Media, Entertainment & Publishing

Implementation of an edtech platform for online tutor scheduling

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 11:47:12 +0000

Implementation of an edtech platform for online tutor scheduling admin Mon, 01/02/2023 - 11:47

Implementation of an edtech platform for online tutor scheduling with in-depth live class mechanism

Edtech

Belgium, Netherlands

Ideation & project roadmap development

Drupal custom module development

Drupal site building & frontend

Support & AMC

Performance optimization

Drupal 8

Apache SOLR

Acquia Cloud

GITLabs

JIRA

Confluence

Browserstack

The client's team had several discussions with us where we interpreted the the market feedbacks we had received into feature set, and they engaged us as a technical consultant to their project. Once the requirement set as hardened, and then development roadmap was clearly laid down, we were obviously the first choice as a development team, considering our contribution to the project so far.

The client is a young and dynamic edtech startup that originated from a varied group of tutors and academics who offer tutoring, both online and in-classroom setup. Headquartered in Ghent, they are active throughout Belgium and the Netherlands. Since 2013, this platform brings students and tutors together. More than 16,000 students have already found a private tutor through their platform.

The portal is an online platform for students to book classes from various tutors of diverse backgrounds. Students can search for tutors and classes based on various filters and criteria. These classes can be both online via web conference, or home tutoring.

This project was meant to be a website for students to book classes from various tutors online. The tutors would register online and fill up various information and their resume. They would then go through an approval process and once verified, their listing would start to appear on the site. Students can search based on different criteria using an extensive filtering mechanism. They can then book the two modes of classes - either online or offline (if a tutor has added this option to his profile).

Then the student makes a payment deposit as per selected tutor as per selected time slot and per hour rate of the tutor. And once done, the payment is escrowed to the tutor, after he enters his bank details, IBAN and BIC details. Another great functionality which we implemented here is the group class feature. Any tutor can start the group class and can mention how many students can be accommodated in one group class. And then students start to register for the class till it is full. There are various complex discount calculations which a student is entitled to if refers another student to the group as there is a feature to get referral discounts for referring other students to the group class. Some of the processes, especially referral discount calculation, were very complex, and our team of experienced backend developers successfully handled those challenges and went above and beyond every expectation.

Here's a gist of some of the functionalities we built grounds up, as per market feedback and analysis, and discussion with the client's product team.

Group Class Mechanism - The client wanted to implement a new feature called group class. So instead of an one on one session, a tutor can create a class at some future date, and allow multiple students to sign up for the same class. This was supposed to be an extension of the existing class system, but would need a special wage and fees calculation mechanism in place.
Referral Credits & Discounts - Client also wanted to start a referral mechanism programme. Here, one student can refer another student to join the site. Such users who join in, become the referral of the invitee, and any subsequent classes they purchase will entitle invitee for some discounts on the class the invitee purchases. Also, this referral mechanism was supposed to be multi level, instead of one level. So if a referred student further refers to another one, the invitee of this referred student also gains a referral credit/discount.
Online Video Conferencing for Online Tutoring Classes - Also, the client needed some enhancements to the online video conferencing feature on top of the existing system.
Design Improvements - There were quite a few pages, which were pretty basic and did not uphold the spirit of the site. The client discussed this matter with our designing team and engaged us to revamp and improve the design elements across the site to make it look more attractive.

The series of features we implemented not only helped the client gain more customers, but it also allowed them to expand to new markets, with considerable revenue boost. We forged a strong professional alliance and continue to support them for all their technical needs,

Bijleshuis Testimonial

While the client already had a MVP launched and they had gained considerable market insights, they needed a technical partner co-work with them to translate these into a solid phased development plan. Our team was able to evaluate the market feedbacks and design robust solutions that transformed customer journey and user experience. The features we implemented led to an overall increase in customer retention by 20%, paid customer conversion by 30% and led to an overall improvement in backend efficiency.

1.5+ years, phased development

Bijleshuis Testimonial II

Heading

Increase in customer retention by 20%

Outcome

With more user friendly process design, the portal became easier to use and the customer retention increased considerably.

Heading

Paid customer conversion by 30%

Outcome

The market analysis revealed some must have features, and once these were implemented, the site saw a surge in paid customer number and overall improved conversion rate.

Heading

Overall improvement in backend efficiency

Outcome

Through the feature optimizations we did, the backend efficiency increases and led to increase in profit.

API & Microservices

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Design & Branding

Digital Prototyping

Performance Optimization

Product Scaling

Support & Maintenance

Team Augmentation

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Browserstack

Confluence

Docker

Drupal 9

Elasticsearch

GIT

Google Cloud

Headless Drupal

JIRA

JMeter

MySQL

Postman

React

Selenium

Edtech

Online chef discovery & hiring network implementation

admin — Mon, 02 Jan 2023 11:45:11 +0000

Online chef discovery & hiring network implementation admin Mon, 01/02/2023 - 11:45

Online chef discovery & hiring network Implementation Including portfolio creation, event management & live chat

Professional Services & Directory Listing, Food & Beverages

USA, Canada

Availability & extensive calendar search, slot booking, events handling

Drupal 9

Elastic Search

Amazon AWS

Platform.sh

Browserstack

Cloudflare

The portal is for foodies and for people willing to get the best taste of dishes made by the expert chefs to search, discover, and book a private chef all around the world – online or from a mobile phone. It is a platform for hiring a chef based on location, distance, event, cuisine type, diet type, experience level, availability, and hourly rate. Its basic purpose is to hire/book chefs for cooking/providing food for various events ranging from weddings to potlucks. It is also a very good platform for chefs to feature themselves and their skills with an authentic rating system to promote their profiles highlighting their achievements and awards.

The project was envisioned to make booking chefs easy. And it was just not booking one chef, it wanted to bring in a concept of events, where users can hire multiple chefs and then be able to discuss everything and share information under one unified space. There needed to be a payment mechanism for starting such an event and then an option to cancel an event and get the booking fee refunded into a virtual wallet. Apart from that there would be search based on chef availability, discussion board and profile creation.

The project requirements can be broadly classified into the following aspects:

Design & Conceptualisation

The site needed to be designed and conceptualised by us. The client came to us with certain ideas in mind, but wanted us to actually help them come up with a UI/UX that would be appropriate and a flow that will be easy for non technical users. Our team of creative designers have set a very high standards for themselves already and hence their challenge was to keep up with it. We finally, after a lot of discussion within the team and with the client gave the site a perfect flow that will be appropriate for it's targeted customer base.

Registration and Profile Creation

Users needed to be able to register, either as Chef or as Customer. The registration form would contain same fields, but after registration there would be different fields for each profile. Chef had lot many fields, and this needed to be presented cleanly and very professionally as Chef's public profile which other's could go in and visit.

Events Space

The client wanted to have a space where customer and chefs can discuss and share information regarding the event. We came up with the concept of event. So a Chef can't be directly booked. A customer needs to first create a event. Once he creates can event, he gets an event space. Event space is sort of like a wall feed, and showing details about the event in the sidebar. Users can then search for chef and invite chefs for the event. If a Chef accepts the invite, he or she joins the event space. but chatting can still not begin. Customer now needs to pay for the event (an one time fee) and then once payment is made, the event space opens up. All the parties can upload documents, share information and chat by creating posts. Once an event expires, the chat can no longer be accessed.

Event Cancellation & Refund to Wallet

We implemented a concept of digital wallet, where refunded payment will be called back. It could be used for the next payment for events. The wallet money could not be withdrawn, but later on, in Phase II plan is to integrate this to user points and then be able to purchase point credits using this amount.

Chef Availability Calendar & Search

An extensive search mechanism needed to be integrated. We used Search API + SOLR backend. But we also needed to search based on availability of Chefs. For Chefs time slots, we used Opening Hours module, which nicely provided the slots and then wrote it's integration for search API. The system worked great. We provided Facets through Search API Facets module.

The project was a great success, the client was extremely satisfied with the end result. The design that we produced was highly appreciated and the functionality was smooth, and very easy to use and understand even for non technical users, who was a big target audience for the client - the Chefs.

Potluck Chefs Testimonial

Owing to our expertise in product development lifecycle, we were able to guide this client in building and launching their product from an idea into a fully refined marked tested product. From the outset, the goal of the product was to quickly work on and release an MVP, and from thereon release features in phases towards achieving a product-market fit. Our team assisted the client throughout this journey, and enabled the client save a lot of cost and gain significant competitive advantage through an early MVP release, leading to faster market penetration and revenue growth.

MVP in 12 weeks, 2+ years of continuous development

Potluck Chefs Testimonial II

Cloud & DevOps

Digital Design & Branding

Digital Prototyping

MVP Development

Performance Optimization

Product Design Strategy

Product-Market Fit

Team Augmentation

UI Design & Implementation

Web Development

Amazon AWS

Angular

Browserstack

Confluence

Drupal 8

Elasticsearch

GIT

Headless Drupal

MySQL

Postman

Food & Beverages