Highload News Aggregator for DUMA™
Learn how Codica helped the African media market leader scale the existing solution, migrate to AWS without downtime, and improve the page load speed time by 2 times on mobile devices.
Domain:Online Media
Location:Africa
Timeline:July 2019 - Ongoing
Services:Front-end, Back-end, MVP development services, Custom software development services
Team:1 Frontend Developer, 1 Backend Developer, 1 QA Engineer, 1 Project Manager, 1 DevOps Engineer
Core Technologies:Ruby, Ruby on Rails, AWS, Sidekiq, Redis, Gitlab CI, JavaScript
“We are the biggest and the most popular online news portal in Africa. In 2019 we were changing software service providers and came across a young, dynamic team from Ukraine, Codica, with great expertise and an impressive portfolio in custom software development.
We started our collaboration with some minor platform changes and redesign. Later on, Codica provided a custom solution for our main website which helped us improve the page load speed. We now have a complex, scalable news platform, optimized for search engines. Thanks to this, we can offer a new customer experience in the media market.”
James Cannon Boyce
Founder of Africa New Media Group
Background
The Africa New Media Group is the #1 entertainment news provider in Africa. The main idea behind the product is to deliver news and quality multimedia content to the African audience fast, especially on mobiles.The news portal has one main website (DUMA™ news aggregator) covering several themes or ecosystems. Each ecosystem consists of simple websites whose posts are automatically cloned to the main aggregator website.
The customer wanted to create a unified back-end solution to be able to easily set up new websites within the existing ecosystems or create new ones.In 2019, when we started our work, there were 5 websites in total for several locations only. Currently, DUMA™ news portal covers 11 locations in Africa and has 2 ecosystems: Celebrity News and Fashion, with 17 live websites and more under development.
Challenges
- Make quality redesign website of the existing solution based on the client’s designs and requirements;
- Integrate ads and sponsored content;
- Optimize the monolithic web application for mobile use;
- Create one universal back-end solution with a different front-end for every ecosystem;
- Migrate to AWS without downtime.
Value delivered
- Set up a convenient system for integrating advertising and sponsored content as one of the ways of the news portal monetization;
- Performed website optimization for search engines for all ecosystems;
- Improved the page load speed time by two times on mobile devices even with an unstable Internet connection;
- Performed migration from Heroku to AWS without downtime;
- Created 17 live websites and more under development for different countries of Africa;
- Enhanced performance of the existing high-load news aggregator;
- Optimized the development time of the new websites and ecosystems with the ability to constantly scale the portal.
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Solution delivered
Multi-location news portal
Currently, DUMA™ news aggregator covers 11 African locations and two ecosystems: Fashion and Celebrity News.These ecosystems have 17 live websites and a few more under development.These simple websites have a similar design and functionality.
High-load news aggregator
DUMA™ shares real-time news about celebrities, fashion, sports, lifestyle, and more on a daily basis.The platform’s target audience is mobile users, who spend much time on the website and interact with its content.The platform can manage up to 1,000 users simultaneously. Thanks to this, the traffic grew to 1 million page views a month.
Website speed optimization
Internet connection speed in Africa may be as low as 0.30/4.63 (download/upload), on average not exceeding 20 Mbps.Since the local Internet is slow, our main task was to optimize the website loading speed for mobile users.We have improved the page load speed time by two times for images, third-party scripts, and ads.
Convenient admin panel
DUMA™ news website has a user-friendly admin panel. With its help, a team of editors can instantly post content to each website, schedule news posts, and easily clone posts from other ecosystems.
Easy start for new ecosystems
Currently, the DUMA™ aggregator consists of two ecosystems. But it’s not a limit.Codica’s development team can now easily clone new ecosystems. This gives the business owners an opportunity to scale up the platform and grow fast.
Extensive opportunities for sponsored content
DUMA™ created an excellent opportunity for different affiliate programs and local publishers.Ads and sponsored content are shown as native banner ads, as well as in The Hot Box section on all the websites.
How it works
Take a look at how this online news portal works. Currently the news aggregator includes 17 live websites with more under development.
“Our collaboration started with website redesign services, and minor changes including Ruby on Rails development. Later on, we found many great opportunities for DUMA™ platform improvement, and eventually managed to help our client’s business grow from 5 websites to 35.
Additionally, our team did an excellent job on the website optimization for search engines, improving the pages load time. We also provided MVP development for another client’s idea, a solution for a freelance portal within the aggregator.
Interesting work on such high-load systems as DUMA™ and the real value we deliver to the customer boost my daily motivation.”
Maksym
Ruby on Rails Developer at Codica
Technologies
Ruby on Rails
Ruby
AWS
Sidekiq
Redis
Gitlab CI
JavaScript
Integrations
Google Tag Manager
Google Ads
Taboola
“What we liked most about our mutual work is Codica’s good understanding of the media domain, ads and sponsored content importance, and the team’s professional communication.
Codica helped avoid massive downtimes when we were moving our platform to AWS and came up with a timely MVP solution for platform collaborators.
We are now working together to make DUMA™ even better and faster. We are glad to have a reliable software development partner that helps us grow.”
James Cannon Boyce
Founder of Africa New Media Group
Let’s build a great custom product together!
What’s next?
- 1. Our Sales Manager Taya will be in touch with you within 1 business day.
- 2. We will sign the NDA if required, and start the project discussion.
- 3. Our custom software development experts will analyze your requirements and suggest the best ways to bring your idea to life.
