The Proposal Story
Summary
TheProposalStory.com was launched in late 2009 as an online community for the sharing of genuine, creative and romantic wedding proposals. The site's goal was to bring people together around a common and happy theme - the wedding proposal. Adsum Drive was heavily involved in bringing this idea to reality.
The Challenge
The challenge presented to Adsum Drive for this project was to develop an online community that was fully integrated with the latest social networking technologies. The content for the most part would be user generated so it was important for the site to be simple and easy to use for members. It was also very important that the registration process was as easy as possible to avoid losing potential members to any sign-up hurdles.
In addition to these usability issues, the site needed to have two types of accounts, users and business users. The several types of content also had to be organized in various ways and easily searchable. It was a very large undertaking - our largest project to date - and we enjoyed the challenge of bringing this concept to life.
The Solution
In order to tackle such a large project, we recruited the help of our partners at Emilicious Designs Inc. (EDI) and Look At Me Marketing (LAMM). The site design was done in parallel with the development and this was facilitated by using a web framework that completely separated logic from design - a nice way to work and stay efficient. Our friends at LAMM helped us to fully define our requirements and SEO focus. Development was done in house using Zend Framework and the Dojo Javascript Framework.
To address the social networking and easy registration process, we turned to Facebook Connect. Facebook Connect allowed for a simple, secure registration process that was integrated with the site's user profiles for a seamless way to create a new account. It also allowed the site's users to share their social graph on the site and share content and events on TheProposalStory.com back to their Facebook accounts. To add even more sharing to the site - YouTube, Google Maps, Flickr, and Vimeo integration was added to allow users to bring content in from their other social accounts.
