JTA
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Focused Services
- Interaction Design
- Visual Design
- Server-side Development
- Blog Integration
- Content Migration
- Server Deployment
- Server Migration
- Server Configuration
- Server Load Balancing
- Social Networking
- Adaptive Development
- Performance Optimization
Applied Technology
Overview
The Jewish Telegraphic Agency (JTA) is an international news agency headquartered in New York, NY. With an online readership of over 250,000 unique visitors per month, JTA sought to further engage its readers with social media. Additionally, JTA’s content management system failed to support its complex hierarchy of content developers, and the volume and frequency of content updates. Purple, Rock, Scissors was brought on board to execute a strategic redesign of the website.
The Challenge
The integration of social media required an overhaul of the site architecture and visual design. Additionally, JTA required the selection of a third party content management system, capable of handling the complex attributes of the project. Moreover, Purple, Rock, Scissors was responsible for the seamless migration of over 26,000 articles, 6,000 images, 5,000 blog posts, and 8,000 user-generated comments.
The Solution
Purple, Rock, Scissors optimized the usability of the website, overhauling the information architecture, interaction design and visual design. The website was developed on the Expression Engine platform, which offered basic user profiles, comments, permissions, and more. Beyond Expression Engine’s capabilities, Purple, Rock, Scissors developed custom extensions to increase the breadth of the feature set, such as a “Digg” clone and “Readers Recommend.” Custom scripts were written to successfully migrate the data from JTA’s deprecated database into a newer, more powerful environment. Additionally, the application was deployed on a load-balanced server to help optimize content delivery and provide redundancy during peak hours.
The Result
In just months, Purple, Rock, Scissors’ overhaul of JTA’s website resulted in thousands of new member registrations, and over a 20% increase in the volume of user-generated content. Additionally, the new content management system streamlined the organization’s ability to effectively manage articles, blogs, and multimedia. Since launch, thousands of articles have been published through the new website.