Background

The site will be targeted towards teenagers and youngsters in particular and everybody on earth in general.

The site will be an online slam book where users can make the world feel about their childhood memories, recollect those wonderful college days, update their work skills and let people know about their professional achievements.

The site will be a Social Networking site with a niche thought- Insanity- as a theme. Having such a unique theme as a center point, client requirements were pretty much indefinite and varied.

The site will provide users with the facility to create profile, upload media (photos & videos), write scrap/blurbs, join with friends and professionals etc. The site will provide a common platform for users from different user groups to come together online and connect. User participation is promoted through extensive use of profile creation, groups, friends etc.

TAlong with Front End, client requirements were for a backend as well from where frequent changes were possible easily.

Objective and Pursued Audience

“The rationale behind developing a website was to provide a common platform for teenagers, youngsters and professionals to come together and share. The site was expected to provide a thorough online community experience to the users and was incorporated with many a community features like Profile Creation, Friends, Fans, Scrapbook, Blogs etc.”

The site was developed for geographically, demographically varied audience like Teenagers, Youngsters and Professionals.

Challenges

Before starting actual design and development, we did the risk analysis for the development and came up with certain immediate concerns which needed to be taken care of while development.

First, development of a vigorous framework which is capable of managing and sustaining millions of users at a time was a challenging task.

Taking into consideration the large user base in future, the technology alternatives were limited.

Developing and incorporating an extensive list of profile customization options, complex ranking systems and voting contests designed for enhancing users' active participation.

Another challenge was synchronizing the features like Blog, Friends, E-mail etc smoothly while being executed simultaneously.

Being a community portal, secure transfer of data was required.

Technologies Used

After taking into consideration all the challenges and customer requirements, we discussed a couple of alternative technologies suitable for the development. After all-inclusive study, we landed on the following architecture deploy

Probably the best suited programming language with stability, reliability and robust framework. Collection of data from the DB very quickly and swiftly. Stable with enormous users at a time  Free, Highly customizable, low maintenance database management system. Passed the test of stability even in high volume environments Crossover browser support & faster loading time with light web pages that require no plug-in downloads. Scalable JavaScript based controls to provide flexibility and enhance user experience and involvement. CSS helps primarily in separation of document content. This separation can improve content accessibility, provide more flexibility and control in the specification of presentation characteristics, and reduce complexity and repetition in the structural content

Resources Deployed

Project manager 1 Designer(s) 1 Developer(s) 4 Quality Assurance Personnel 1

Approach

ASP.NET and MySQL formed the basis of development as the site was a corporate site targeted towards Community Portals. The site was incorporated with extensive features and required the 'faster to market' transition of such concepts.

Blogs, Scrapbook, Friends and other modules were developed in ASP.NET in a way that they can be executed directly from the UI layer. These files consisted of all Business logics used for respective modules like Save (Add/Update), Delete, Get single object, get multiple objects for listing and were designed to be capable of handling many more logics which were not related to the database.

The Data Access layer contained the libraries responsible for accessing data from database and built a generic query for insert, update, delete and select, depending on the business class.

All business layer components were coded to use this library for data accessing process from database. Stored procedures were used only for complex retrieval of data from multiple tables and were entirely avoided with conditional syntax to ensure smooth performance of the website.

The UI layer was kept free of any business logic with images, applications and data being called from their respective servers.

Key Features

The website itself was created on the very idea to give a common platform for varied users which include Teenagers, College Students, and Professionals to come together and share.

The site was broadly divided into three categories viz. General Public, Subscribed Members and Site Admin.

Some features like Profile creation were so very detailed, innovative and vital that it took a whole lot of brainstorming with regards to technology, approach, look and feel.

The site was made rich and interesting by incorporating features like Fans, Global Hub to create a open discussion thread etc.

Site was also incorporated with the features like Uploading Pictures, Videos to encourage user participation and ensure the user revisits to the site.

The site was made extremely easy to navigate with the judicious use of Ajax, JavaScript and navigation guidelines were strictly followed.