Case Study 3 - New Audio Society

CASE STUDY #3 - NORTH EASTERN WISCONSIN AUDIO SOCIETY

NEWAS Audio Group now on Joomla CMS This was an interesting project for us since it involves a local audio club and a shared passion for all things music and audio related.

The project started around 2005 with the creation of a small HTML based website with a Yabb Forum facilitating interaction between club members. Over the years the Forum traffic has increased steadily and in 2009 was up to between 800 and 1100 unique visitors per day.

In 2010 it was decided that the site should be migrated to a new host server more accommodating to the traffic/bandwidth requirements and more affordable too, since this is a non profit organization.

Again this is the case where a small website with a few HTML pages and an active community had evolved in an 'uncontrolled' manner into something much bigger. To allow for continued growth the nettle had to be grasped and the site redesigned onto a platform allowing for future controlled expansion.

There were several design criteria to consider, not least of which was the transfer of a Yabb community forum to a new host server. The Forum had attracted over 1700 members and logged around 12,000 posts, occupying around 750MB of server space. The Yabb software had not been upgraded in over two years, meaning the migration had to be stepped into the latest version of software. The data transfer/migration had actually been attempted 18 months previously without success. Yabb scripting errors prevented the completion of the forum transfer to a new host and the project was put on hold for over a year.

Fortunately, the latest version of Yabb Forum software appeared to have fixed the earlier migration glitches and the transfer to a new server location was completed without too much trouble.

Yabb Forum integration on Joomla Platform At the same time as the Yabb transfer, the main body of the website was given a cosmetic redesign and all of the content transferred into Joomla CMS.

An article writing and editing system was installed within Joomla, allowing certain group members to be assigned 'Editor' privileges whereby product reviews can be written and posted directly to the appropriate review category through a front-end GUI. This process simplified site admin significantly and encouraged group members to build important website content.

Other Joomla modules and functionality has been implemented to give the website a more dynamic feel, including Polls, surveys, page-peel banners and dynamic image gallery components.

The website has a more modern feel and is simpler to navigate and use. It continues to attract more forum members, up to 1800 at the time of writing.

The article and review posting section is something that other website owners might consider adding, since it is an invaluable resource and the ideal way to develop on-theme website content. There are Joomla components that operate a 'reward' or 'points system' where content contributors are given a points incentive to post content, the points redeemable against products or features offered at the website. This is at the heart of Web2.0, building community tools that offer incentives for customer/visitor loyalty.