With the new website, Gloss has been able to save over 40% of costs due to optimization of the database as well as increase in speeds of the site. Within the first 4 months, the website recorded a susbcriber base of 14,000 members.
Gloss is the first online destination in New Zealand dedicated exclusively to connecting with women at every stage of their life. The Gloss website is providing women with an online magazine, tailored to the interests and needs of women aged 15-60+.
Women prefer to be defined by their interests and life-stages, as opposed to their age and the Gloss website provides a portal for businesses to ‘Milestone Market’ their products and services. The site helps clients to connect with females at the right time, with the right message – taking advantage of new marketing tools, channels and technologies.
The website’s strongest demographic is the highly coveted 25+ market. With an active database of over 80,000, Gloss provides a unique marketing opportunity for businesses wanting to reach the female demographic.
BUSINESS CHALLENGE
While Gloss core concepts encompassed the site’s overall product delivery, rapid member growth and changes in technology impeded Gloss’ service delivery to its customers.
According to the CEO, Blair Dodds, “We were experiencing rapid growth from our initial infrastructure investment and we quickly had to find a way to meet our bottom line targets within a set time for maximum client satisfaction.”
Gloss needed to develop its system’s capability to sustain its user needs and avoid crashing during high traffic. It also had a host of new products and features to introduce to its clients.
Recognizing that the problem herein lay with challenging technological prowess as opposed to the product itself, Gloss quickly identified Verviant as a veritable IT consultancy firm with unmatched IT expertise in its field. In enrolling Verviant’s expert team of programmers and designers, Gloss was guaranteed to improve its site’s standing at a timely, cost effective and overall cost-saving price.
SOLUTION
Verviant carried out infrastructure optimisation by upgrdading MySQL and stabilising Apache at the backend to ensure optimal thoroughput of the website during navigation by website visitors. Verviant also set up a continual monitoring system to ease user overload on the server.
Our Design team made significant changes to website’s overall design by adding exciting features such as video, photo galleries, blog and social networking.
Further upgrades and optimisation to the system included: shopping cart, administrator, logon, and search engine functions.
The site has been able to incorporate community features that enable users to interact freely within the site and add to the Gloss Magazine community of users.
Tools and features include:
Joomla® Content Management System
- Linux, Apache, MySQL, PHP
- SEO
- Video and Audio
- Social network integration
- Ajax based image gallery system
- AD Banner Management
BENEFITS
Gloss has been able to save over 40% of costs due optimization of the database as well as increase in speeds of the site.
Within the first 4 months, the website recorded a susbcriber base of 14,000 members.
There is more traffic on the site due to the community concept and the community continues growing and generating income. Good SEO has seen the website rank high in searches on Search Engines.
Website: http://www.gloss.co.nz
