Hachette Filipacchi Media Relaunches CarandDriver.com

Car and Driver is a high traffic content driven website requiring timely updates to content and the aggregation of data from multiple third parties. The current site had numerous errors visible to end users and was on a version of a product that was outdated.

The Solution

NorthPoint evaluated the existing data and application architecture comparing it to sites of similar complexity and visibility that had been completed in the past. A significant change in the way the data was structured would be required to both fix the current issues as well as fulfill future plans for growth. In addition to re-architecting the data structure, upgrading to the newest release of their Web Content Management platform was vital.

NorthPoint's implementation of eZ Publish was modeled after past successful deployments on high traffic sites, providing strong caching protection at multiple layers of the delivery. These best practices allowed for more time to be spent optimizing the data to allow for faster page generation times, and reduced the overall risk to the project.

Content / Data Migration

Car and Driver is a heavily data driven website with nearly as much third party data as internally created content. This content was poorly structured in the old site and created an undue burden on page rendering times, often resulting in error pages being delivered instead of content. Based on the earlier research into the data requirements NorthPoint was able to greatly reduce the number of dependencies each article had on external and internal resources. In addition the migration allowed for the simplification of the editorial workflow process by eliminating the majority of content classes and reorganizing the internal folder structure.

Platform / Framework Upgrade

NorthPoint upgraded the site from an older eZ Publish version running on PHP 4 / Apache 1.2 to the latest stable version with the ability to run on PHP 5 / Apache 2.X. This greatly increased the performance and scalability potential for the site, as well as improving the reliability and reducing the on going maintenance costs. Early testing has shown the pages being delivered 4 times faster than before.