Case Studies
DC Comics ZUDA - www.zudacomics.com/
You know you are in for something special when you step off the elevator and you’re greeted by life size images of Superman and Batman. Originally brought in by IBM as Drupal Subject Matter Experts, Achieve Internet assisted the DC Comics development team in rapping up phase one of the Zuda.com project. Zuda.com is a contest site for aspiring artists with a Social Networking twist. The site not only allows the general public to submit comic strips, it also promotes the community at-large to vote and comment on each entry. The site features message boards and blogs all built on the Drupal platform.
As part of phase 2 of the project, DC Comics asked Achieve Internet to improve the search capabilities as well as the Permissions functionality. Given the potential for traffic and the standard that all divisions of Warner Brothers must achieve, the optimal solution was a Solr Lucene search. The Solr search resides on a separate piece of hardware and indexes the website independently of Drupal. This Enterprise Level solution increases performance as well as enhances the user experience with superior results.
NBCU - www.holamun2.com/
As a leader in the entertainment world, NBCU has hundreds of web properties that require constant attention. The cost of maintaining proprietary CMS software and the restrictions of those applications led them to Drupal. The Telemundo division of NBCU contacted Achieve Internet for help on their HolaMun2.com property. HolaMun2.com is an English language Latino focused Pop Culture website directed at the 13 to 18 year old demographic.
One of the first projects Achieve was involved in was a Photo Gallery module for the website. Like so many Drupal modules Photo Gallery is dependent on a number of other Drupal modules, specifically Registration, Commenting and Permissions. Pretty images are nice however the member experience is always the most important aspect of any Social Networking website. Within membership Permissions are one of the most commonly under developed modules in Drupal. Achieve Internet has taken over development of dozens of websites over the years and almost every project requires us to completely rewrite Permissions.
Another aspect of the HolaMun2.com website was their search. Even though the out-of-the-box Drupal search works fine for smaller sites, large volume Enterprise Level websites should not be using the Drupal search. Achieve Internet installed and hosted a Solr Lucene search solution for NBCU which increased performance and the overall user experience.
Univision - www.univisionpromotions.com/
The affiliate marketing group of Univision Communications Inc. came to Achieve Internet with a capacity issue. Even though Univision has their own web development team based in Florida, their affiliate marketing group in Los Angles found the lead time and the flexibility of producing web-based projects not conducive to their needs. Tasked with promoting subscriptions in the Latino market for their cable provider client, the affiliate marketing group focuses on monthly newsletters and multi-channel giveaways.
The first project presented to Achieve Internet was a giveaway run by the TuTv team. They needed to build a mini website that could display the promotion, ensure the rules were read and understood, collect basic and detailed demographic information and finally provide an interface to dissect and extract the valuable data collected. The backbone to this website was the detailed demographics collection which used true/false, multiple choice and open field questions. Of course a promotion has a limited audience and time frame so Achieve had to build a system that could handle multiple promotions starting and finishing at different times.
In addition to giveaways and promotions the Univision affiliate team also sends out a monthly newsletter to their counterparts at companies such as Time Warner, Cox, Comcast, Qwest and Cablevision. The newsletter is recreated every month with a new theme and all new content. After a strenuous approval process Achieve sends five different versions of the newsletter to five separate regions of the county each month.
Since the project's inception participation in the Univision promotions has increased 500% and readership of the newsletter has doubled.