Multilingual IT-portal

Customer

The customer was a huge American company, dealing with software development and specializing in design and development of business-applications for mobile devices, web amd media.

Objectives

The principal requirement of the customer was to develop a multilingual portal for the active participants of IT community, leading software developers and international companies all around the world. The portal supposed to become a forum for discussing hot news in IT world, exchange of experiences and ideas, speculations on various projects implementation, the place where millions of adherers could cooperate in order to develop more qualitative software. Besides, the website should have contained various application tools and certain content (articles, news, blogs, newsletters) to enable market leaders to make their business more profitable.

 Solution

Formerly, we had an experience of cooperation with this customer, namely a small website on fixed price. As it was found later, it had been a kind of test which supposed to demonstrate qualification and experience of our developers as well as their social skills and amount of time for developing and implementing of the product.

Soon after we finished the so-called test project and the customer accepted the realization of the project, we started discussing the details of the further cooperation on IT-portal development and implementation. As the company which the customer represented regarded as a huge one, we faced some bureaucratic runarounds, which fortunately we pulled through and came to negotiations about the terms of cooperation. It was decided to work on Time&Material basis.

Besides, we came to a decision to start with 2 PHP-developers, also planning to involve a tester as the third member in a month’s time. The project was divided into 2 stages. During the iteration we managed to realize the following functionality:

1. SEO optimization
2. feedback form
3. user activity detection
4. Twitter box
5. “similar links” and “sponsor links” boxes
6. “latest comments” box
7. “best comments on news and blogs” box
8. forum
9. Facebook and Linkedln synchronization, etc.

 The second stage included the website mobile application development and the most popular section – forum in English, German, Chinese and Japanese.

The project turned into the beginning of long mutually profitable cooperation between our company and the customer. We are still cooperating, involved in the development of business web-solution.

Technologies used

Linux, Windows, Apache HTTP Server v2.0, MySQL v5.x, PHP v5.x, JavaScript 1.3, Yii.