DELIVERING TAILOR MADE, OPTIMIZED, WELL THOUGHT OUT WEBSITES & APPS
DELIVERING TAILOR MADE, OPTIMIZED, WELL THOUGHT OUT WEBSITES & APPS
Client approached us with the idea to develop “A women generated, knowledge-based, Q&A platform.”. Basically, a social network where women can feel comfortable and get first-hand advice from other women.
After initial back & forth, we decided to do a MVP in WordPress.
Since we wanted to make it worthwhile for the client, the main focus was on speed and flexibility, so that when the time comes to switch to something more robust, the switch can be as pain-free as possible.
Everything has to be as fast as possible and support as many users as possible, so that the time when we need to switch to something different comes as late as possible
Most of the decisions were done with speed in mind, for both development and website itself.
Create feeds with questions
Create user profiles
Create upvote/downvote/comment functionality
Search
Channels
Notifications
We used native wordpress posts for questions, so that the search and everything else works out of the box. We had to create custom posts insertion from the frontend, but that was the only “complicated things for this one”.
These are wordpress users. All the details are user meta, and forms for updating them are Advanced Custom Fields frontend forms. Simple, quick and efficient.
Comments are – surprise – wordpress comments :) Upvotes/downvotes are post/comment meta. We did a lot of optimization for upvotes/downvotes so they work as fast as possible – which in this case meant a lot of dynamic caching. On the comments front, we had to do a custom implementation of both backend and frontend. Although it was initially complex, it was so worth it when we got the final product.
Search is one of those “Easy to do – hard to master” things. Since the initial focus was not on the search itself, we decided its better to invest hours elsewhere and to use a relevanssi plugin as a “good enough” solution. A bonus point for us here is since we went with completely native functionality for all the things in wordpress, relevansii search worked great out of box. When more content and users start rolling in, we will get a lot of relevant data from relevansi on what they are searching for, so a proper solution will take less time afterwards.
Channels are categories in which we group questions – so we used wordpress taxonomies. For additional details we used tax meta.
For notifications we used a custom post type. There was a lot of debate on if we should develop something completely custom, but the decision landed on CPT for now – it kept the cost of development down, and since notifications will be reworked in future when more users come onboard – it made perfect sense.
Milos and his great team delivered excellent work on this WP development project, bringing our platform from the design phase to an actual website (desktop and mobile versions). I enjoyed working with him a lot! He is very responsive, he met all deadlines and always completed his tasks with a very big smile. During the project, he went out of his way to provide with additional assistance, even in fields that are not related to his expertise, such as design, product and user experience, providing helpful tips and advice. I enjoyed working with Milos and for sure will likely have additional jobs for him in the future.
Dana S.
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