ZAXID.NET News Portal Development Case Study

Executive Summary

ZAXID.NET is the first analytical online news portal in Lviv, Ukraine. It mainly provides Lviv and regional news by giving expert opinions and laying the ground for discussion. Except the main news, texts, blogs, it also has a distinct feature – zaxid.net TV, which is a video section that provides news streaming.

Challenge

ZAXID.NET was developed and released in 2007. After few years it needed an update of the whole system as it didn’t meet modern technology requirements and worked unstable.

The second problem it issued was a lot handwork that was done offline by 30 journalists. So the future web application needed to reduce man-hours and improve employees performance.

Solution

Romexsoft has delivered a Rescue Mission service for zaxid.net – rewrote the entire application changing its architecture and handled front-end and back-end development. After the launch, we also provided redesign services of an existing project for staying up to date with current industry trends.

By developing full-text search, hit highlighting and faceted search, we improved website usability and raised an amount of user views.

Now zaxid.net can sustain a huge amount of data with high-performance stability solution while providing a fast search over site content simultaneously. As the result, zaxid.net attracts over 50-100k users per day.

To improve journalists’ performance we reduced lots of manual work by shortening the user flow, implementing online editorial software and created a handy media file database.

The overall development activities resulted in reducing time to market, enlarging website audience and increasing client’s income based on media advertisement.

Key features include:

• latest news production and publishing;
• online video streaming;
• news archiving;
• search system – Solr API integration;
• author’s blogs and opportunity for users to comment via social networks;
• data optimization.