Case Studies

CASE STUDY//TRAVELWIRES

September 12, 2016

THE STORY

TravelWires is an on-line news distribution service and press releases agency founded in 2005. Articles being distributed through the website are picked up and pushed to consumers instantly by world-renowned news channels like Google News and Bing News.

Back in 2015, TravelWires was built using WordPress with an outdated theme and lots of security and usability concerns. Customers were unable to publish their announcements unless they would contact TravelWires by email and in turn, editors would manually publish the press release.

Since 2015, TravelWires contacted us to create an integrated and automatic news distribution software with a brand new, shiny design. Development for the project took only two months and now the system is live - bringing a huge increase in both revenue and traffic.

KEY DEVELOPMENT FEATURES

TravelWires is built using the Laravel framework and Angular JS for the front end customer dashboard single page application.

It's key features include:

  • A custom design created from scratch by our web design team. It features a flat interface with large images that allow readers to focus on the content. The dashboard is developed with one thing in mind - flawless interaction and usability for customers.
  • A custom tailored set of database models for content delivery which interacts with both the old "legacy" WordPress tables and the new - better structured tables in Laravel. Technologies used and implementation: Laravel database migrations, advanced SQL queries that render results from two completely different databases instantly, Unit Tests for predicting server loads and speed.
  • Custom Analytics APIs that provide real time data to customers who have published press releases. Technologies used and implementation: the spatie/laravel-analytics package is used for running advanced queries in real time against Google Anaytics and in conjunction with the apps own reporting logic provide relevant traffic reports for paying customers.
  • To avoid low image quality in press releases we've built a custom API solution that gives users the ability to search through various image libraries on the Internet - choose one and then crop it with an HTML5 based cropper. Technologies used and implementation: Custom built API client and a custom Angular JS component for cropping and resizing images.
  • Paypal payments for packages and a ticketing system for orders and press release submission. The customer dashboard features Paypal payments built with the "anouar/paypalpayment" package and a ticketing system that allows easy interaction between the site admin and the customer who wants to publish a press release. Custom built Angular JS components have been used for this part of the project so the path from registration to payment and press release submission happens without any page refresh.

Technologies used for this project:

  • Server side:
    • Laravel
    • anouar/paypalpayment
    • doctrine/dbal
    • spatie/laravel-analytics
    • roumen/feed
    • roumen/sitemap
    • grunt js / grunt sass / grunt uglify / grunt watch for assets management
  • Client Side:
    • angular js
    • sass
    • a custom js plugin for handling touch events
    • angular tinymce
    • angular chart
    • custom angular component for image cropping using canvas

RESULTS

Once the project was completed a huge increase in traffic was immediately seen - as well as a drastic decrease of server resources being used due to code optimization.

Two weeks after it went live, the new TravelWires website already has:

  • 400 newly published press releases
  • 60 new customers
  • E-Book numbers increased from aprox. 200 in 2011 to aprox. 1K in 2016
  • Continuous expansion sliding from an e-Books only approach to a educational software company with Web3Box "in the back-end"
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