Case Study: Spine Universe

Spine Universe turns to NorthPoint to help develop, enhance, and customize Drupal to accommodate future growth. Spine Universe, a leading health resource for both patients and physicians specializing in Spinal treatments and diseases, offers patients suffering from spine ailments a well developed and maintained resource to help them understand their back or neck problems in clear, straightforward language to help explain what causes spinal problems and how they can be treated. Along with offering patient content Spine Universe also offers physicians a resource where they can directly publish their own case studies share their experience with other physicians and collaborate on new methodologies and techniques in treating spinal problems. Spine Universe is a wholly owned subsidiary of Vertical Health.

The Challenge

With a quickly growing traffic base and a cumbersome content management system Spine Universe realized the need to develop a new content management platform and build a technology infrastructure capable of accommodating expected traffic growth. Utilizing an internal team Spine Universe began migrating their CMS to the Drupal Open Source CMS. During the process the internal team became overwhelmed with the amount of content and the sophisticated application enhancements to Drupal platform that were needed to help manage Spine Universe’s broad range of content. Spine Universe turned to NorthPoint to help develop, enhance, and customize Drupal while architecting an enterprise class content management system and enhancing the technology infrastructure to accommodate future growth.

The Solution

Leveraging NorthPoint’s broad range of experience with Drupal the internal team working in tandem with NorthPoint’s team were able to reorganize the content structure, enhance the Drupal CMS application and implement an enterprise class web site ready to meet the demands of future growth while allowing the internal Spine users and physicians the flexibility and freedom to manage their content in a new and innovative way.

The NorthPoint team brought a gamut of best practices for Drupal development to the table enabling the internal Spine Universe development team to quickly re-evaluate the development process, the content structure, and frame the over all project in a simple and concise way enabling them to get the project back on track in a very brief amount of time.

Northpoint’s deep understanding of the Drupal CMS helped Spine Universe to consolidate their customized Drupal modules in order to better utilized the Drupal API and reduce the memory load required during the Drupal boot strapping process freeing up additional server resources to accommodate higher traffic loads along with the implementation of a multi-level caching strategy including Drupal cache, Memcached, and edge level caching NorthPoint further increased the Site’s ability to quickly deliver content to thousands of users.