Last year, we were commissioned to build a website for a client who wanted to increase the profile of environmentally friendly products and services.
Upon analysing their business needs, we all quickly realised that the best way of doing so would be to develop an online community. We viewed the bringing together of like-minded people as a vital first step in the longer-term plan for the Cooltribe brand.
Furthermore, to aid the future development of this concept, we made the momentous decision to build this social network from scratch.
Seven months and 1,000 man hours later, the first phase of site – www.cooltribe.com – has just gone live. So we felt now would be a good time to elaborate a little on the process we went through, and some of the challenges we faced bringing the project to fruition.
Building on strong foundations
In order to get a site of this scope off the ground, we knew we needed a rock-solid project plan and a proper underlying object-oriented architecture, rather than ad hoc in-page PHP scripting.
This in itself took a lot of work. The plan had to be developed alongside a functional specification that we built up through auditing a large number of sites, assessing their features to ascertain those which we felt we could incorporate or build upon in Cooltribe.
Only once the overall plan was in place and signed off by the client were the various members of the production team free to begin work on their particular parts of the project.
Making the design decisions
It was a big decision to design the look and feel of the site in-house, due simply to the unusually large scope of the project.
Once we had decided to do so, we had to approach it in a very functional way, always bearing in mind that the application would be very heavy on content.
Therefore, the design had to be realised with a light touch, be flexible in order to handle a wide range of dynamic content, and never detract from the overall purpose for which Cooltribe’s site is intended – to convey information.
To compensate for this minimalistic approach in visual design, we used custom iconography and illustrations. Everything has been developed in-house by our own illustrators and graphic designers.
The site is also built in strict XHTML to the latest standards, thus helping to guarantee its longevity. By keeping all the presentational markup in the CSS, the site is functional and attractive on a wide a variety of devices, from mobile phones and netbooks to our designers’ widescreen monitors.
Alongside the visual and usability sides, we were developing Cooltribe’s major features including the back-end admin system, bespoke commenting and content rating, an extendible email/onsite notifications engine, and sophisticated tagging and search functionality features.
We are particularly proud of the tagging engine. It tags absolutely everything – posts, videos, people, photos, blog entries… This means that all content is linked effectively, so it is as easy as possible to find related items.
This opened up the possibility of advanced features like the mixed search results, meaning that when you search for a tag, you get a mixture of videos, blogs, other members, images, news items and the like.
Of course, you can hone down to any particular type of result too, but the point is that somebody interested first and foremost in a topic is likely to be less interested in what medium the information on that topic is carried in.
Doing this from scratch was an interesting technical challenge, and has ensured that not only can we control the performance aspect of the site to ensure it is fast to use, but we can also update and improve on it more easily asthe needs of the client develop in the future.
Taking problems in our stride
We were glad of the tight project plan and the pre-defined framework we were working within when we came up against the inevitable challenges thrown up in the thick of coding a site on this scale.
We found dealing with such micro-challenges to be much easier when you face them as part of a well thought-out macro framework, as it hems the problems in to a local level.
For instance, the site uses a sophisticated uploading mechanism within JavaScript-initiated modal popups, and a Flash uploader that allows the user to interact with the application while uploads are taking place.
This means you can add captions or tags while the progress bar reports on the upload – something important when the items uploaded could be large.
However, it was a steep learning curve to conquer the challenges of cross-browser compatibility and the security restrictions on Flash Player 10 as we tried to integrate the JavaScript technology with Flash.
But the cliche goes that the final tenth of any application is the hardest bit to write, and we persevered. We feel strongly that it is this final polishing that makes applications a pleasure to use and helps ensure they stand out from the crowd – so we knew we couldn’t compromise.
The end is just the start
So, we finally put the site live to the public, on time and on budget. But as another cliche states, a website is never finished. With a web application like this it is especially true. It’s not by accident that (like many of the best web apps) we still have the “beta” tag dangling from the decorative branch top-right on the site’s design.
While Cooltribe is still very young, we are now gearing up for the next part of the challenge, as we help to develop this nascent beta into the fully fledged community it is destined to become.
We constantly log user activity both via our own systems and Google Analytics, so we can make recommendations to the client about, for instance, the placement of items on the pages against their actual popularity.
We see this constant monitoring as essential to allowing us to improve the things from real facts and not guesswork.
This way, we can be sure that Cooltribe will be just as relevant to its users in five weeks or five year’s time as it is today.
Tags: bespoke solution, social network, web app
The topic is quite trendy in the net at the moment. What do you pay attention to when choosing what to write about?
Work we’ve done, things we’re talking about in the office, industry current topics… plus as we do web design, internet marketing and business-focused stuff, we naturally end up writing about these areas. In this instance though, we were just lucky enough to be working with a forward-thinking “green” company who wanted a social network!