JIAD Case Study – Scalability & Speed

“The Journal of Interactive Advertising (JIAD) is a refereed online publication designed to promote our understanding of interactive advertising, marketing, and communication in a networked world.”

The original site was extremely difficult to maintain. Changing one word on the navigation meant changing that same word on well over 100 files. The only way to edit articles was to find the HTML file and make changes directly to it, requiring someone with knowledge of HTML and access to a FTP client. The editorial board, which is a collection of many of the authors, had to also be manually edited. Each of the 70+ members had their own HTML file associated to them, which again, a design change to one meant going through each file and making the same change again.

The goals of the redesign was to:

• Increase site scalability
• Increase server speed and stability
• Create an easy way to edit articles
• Design a better in-site search engine
• Promote search engine rankings
• Attractive, minimalistic design

Easily Edit Articles

The first task of the redesign was to increase the efficiency of editing articles and board members. To do this, the site was converted into a fully database-driven website.

A small custom content management system was developed to allow easy page changes to the site. Since JIAD was now database driven, a WYSIWYG (What You See Is What You Get) editor was put into place. Anybody who has experience with Microsoft Word can easily make changes. While you make changes to the text, the editor converts everything to HTML code in the background.

Editing an Article

Scalability

Another benefit of a database driven website is the decrease of the amount of files to run the site. For displaying articles, JIAD went from over 100 files to just one. This one file can handle hundreds of thousands of articles, and making a change to this file will instantly change all articles.

Each article in the database is also assigned to a specific “Issue”. By doing this, all of the article lists and issue pages are automatically generated. Making a change to an article title or authors automatically updates it’s associated issue page.

Increasing Speed

With over 400 unique visitors a day, it was important to ensure that the site would never slow down. To accomplish this, JIAD was first moved to Element Design’s business class servers. Furthering the speed increase, a caching system was developed for the website.

The caching system that was developed combined both a database-driven site with the speed you get from a file driven website. Before the caching system, when a user visited an article page it then had to access the database and retrieve all necessary information. Once the system was in place, the user now accesses an HTML file that had been automatically generated from the database. The speed benefits come from the fact that not a single user accesses the database when viewing the article, compared to in the past when 100% did.

Search Engine

The previous site search engine was lacking in bringing up relevant search results. Another problem with the original was that the search engine was extremely slow, and slowed down the rest of the site when it was being used. Another issue with it was that the search results were displayed in a ugly, white page that was not part of the JIAD design and look.

A solution to the search problem was to use Google Custom Search. With it, I was able to implement a Google search engine without ever having the user leave the site. Even though it is using Google’s algorithms, functionality, and speed, it was customized to only bring up results within the JIAD site.

The entire site was correctly indexed in Google’s servers due to its standards compliant and accessible code. The logical site structure and clean URLs (the URLs lack question marks and complicated code) also assisted in this, which resulted in JIAD ranking even higher in the search engine results.

Since the site redesign, JIAD now has an impressive Google Page Rank of 6, and searching for “JIAD” or “Journal of Interactive Advertising” now displays a list of site links within the results.