Business requirements

Create a full-featured news portal to complement the printed version of ‘Athens News’, the most respected english-speaking newspaper in Greece, while retaining a multi year, content based, growing archive of all the issues of the printed newspaper editions.

The new www.athensnews.gr should be implemented so as to be attractive and intuitive to visitors, easy-to-use for content authors (journalists with limited computer knowledge) and supply all the infrastructure necessary for supporting advertising-related revenues.

Implementation

The project began by designing an attractive, classic, yet ‘clean’ and useful user interface environment. Based on the Drupal open source Web Content Management System, the initial incarnation of www.athensnews.gr was up for testing very soon. Incorporating a full set of news portal related modules, like ‘weather forecast’, ‘user comments and ratings’, ‘sharing and e-mailing’ articles, member subscriptions, etc, provided the portal with the pre-described functionality. These modules were either developed by Technopolis S.A. as standard add-ons to the project or incorporated and customized as already existing parts from the Drupal community.

The system underwent extensive testing (unit, integration, stress), while the customer’s Sales department staff were trained on the Banner Management platform installed for supporting the uploading and monitoring the advertising content.

Training was concluded with the content managers and, when full content upload and migration were through, the web portal went live on production environment.

Evaluation

With more than 200.000 monthly unique visits and requiring more than 200 GB of Internet bandwidth / month, has been operating with zero (0%) downtime for more than one year now.

The complete hosting infrastructure (servers, network, connectivity, software, databases) and managed services (administration, maintenance, monitoring, alert notfications) are both provided by Technopolis S.A. with a 24x7 SLA. The platform has been expanding with additional functionality ever since and all support requests have been dealt with within 2 working hours max.