Ndevr

Girls United is the premier destination for young black women who are interested in fostering a digital community of leaders. Together, we will learn about and teach one another about beauty, wellness, literacy, entrepreneurship, relationship and creativity. 

THE PROCESS

Essence wanted to launch a new brand and in need of a new website which could be ramped up and launched in very aggressive schedule. 

Some of the requirements included

• Creating a subdomain site
• Easy content management by editors
• Fixed launched date with the media announcement
• Analytics to be blended into the main essence.com site

Time Management

Since we had at tight schedule, Ndevr made put together a timeline with clear note of what needs to be delivered by which party and shared with every team.

Resuable Components

Ndevr evaluated the design and created resuable components throughtout the site to save development time as well we training time. 

Team Management

Communication was the key to make sure every team understands what needs to be done to launch the site on a scheduled date. 

Intuitive Workflow

As there are limited time for editor training. We made sure the article publish workflow is self explatory and intuitive, while making it similar to the Essence.com workflow which editors are already familiar with. 

Typically clients come to us with either a redesign, re-platform, or HELP! type project in mind. They were in the latter category, with hopes to do a redesign in the future after the performance issues were resolved. Shortly after our initial conversations we took over support and maintenance of the self-hosted (AWS) site and put plans in place to fix the performance issues and migrate them to Pantheon.

Project Goal

This one was pretty simply defined, fix the site. The site had not gone a full day without an outage for weeks greatly affecting traffic and ad revenue.

Our Solution

We identified the premium theme as the root cause to the performance issues. Utilizing New Relic we quickly addressed the main issues and brought the site back to life within five hours.

Results

Prior to even beginning our engagement we had their team install New Relic on the AWS servers to begin collecting metrics, which we could use as a baseline later. We could tell nearly immediately the issues were within the theme, and gaining access to the code and content confirmed this. If you’ve never used a tool like New Relic, it essentially slices up your application among areas like database, application code, external requests and others.