Case Studies | EWORX TOOLIP

Domna Samiou

Evi Kostakou — Thu, 05 May 2011 11:43:13 GMT

The Domna Samiou Greek Folk Music Association is a non-profit organization founded in 1981 and its aim is the preservation and dissemination of Greek traditional music. The project’s aim was to design, develop and deliver a portal that would have the dual role of serving as a hub for knowledge regarding the biographic details of Domna Samiou, and a repository of information, resources and media regarding her personal work and related information.

The portal needed to balance aesthetically design with easy access and navigational tools to visitors. Equally the back office needed to be powerful and intuitive to use, in order to allow administrator users of different levels of responsibility to manage the information stored and provided on the portals front end.

The portal provides users with biographic details and profiles of not only Ms Samiou but also others who have worked with her or with her work; lists related media articles, concerts, albums and songs all interlinked together for easier navigation and usage. Searching, filtering and ordering of lists further enhance the experience.

In addition to the traditional functionality – the following extensions were included:

Back Office Administration (LMS): The TOOLIP CMS environment was extended with the addition of a back end office (closely integrated with the front end). Users are provided with functionality which facilitated improved administration of complex pages (e.g. homepage), taxonomy and metadata administration, multimedia library and management.

Musical Database administration: The LMS back office allows for full management of the database entities related with the songs, albums, concerts, partners, publications and media clippings and the relationships between them.

Advanced Text Searching (Apache Lucene): This powerful text search library of features is used to aid searching through the musical library for specific texts besides using the common searching interface (which utilises keywords)

Basic Social Bookmarking Toolbar: All pages of importance have been provided with a toolbar of useful icons that allow for printing, sending an email wit the page’s content but also to submit and promote the page in Twitter, Facebook and Google

Protagon

Evi Kostakou — Wed, 05 Jan 2011 11:19:00 GMT

PROTAGON is one of the largest of news commentary portals in Greece with an average of more than 12,000 unique visitors per day. It hosts opinions and articles from popular Greek journalists and sponsors categories such as “Subjects”, “People”, “Dolce” and “Books”. It also hosts videos from the very popular Sunday night TV show “Protagonistes” which presents original stories of everyday heroes.

EWORX was responsible for (a) re-designing parts of the front-end (other parts did not change from the previous design), (b) developing a state of the art News Management System (NMS), (c) delivering a full scale migration of the content from the previous CMS and (d) delivering a video streaming and video advertisement solution.

In detail, the News Management System included the following features developed and tailored to the client's needs:

Gallery management for videos and photos
Article management
TV Shows management
Tags, categories and user management
Shouts management (a Twitter-like implementation that presents short texts in various parts of the website)
User comments management
Newsletter auto-generation and management
Author's Blogs
Box Management to enable the content management in various 'box container' pages

The migration involved x number of articles, x number of author profiles, x number of comments, x number of tags, x number of video and TV show files, x number of photos, and x number of photo galleries.

In addition, the UX Team performed an in-house usability evaluation of specific high profile pages (e.g. the search page, the article page) and co-ordinated the design and production of more effective designs.

Finally, we developed an infrastructure for supporting the various banner advertisement requirements.

EWORX also provided the technical infrastructure for hosting the videos and serving video advertisements of the portal through a supporting web application (Stream Video Labs).

Hellenic American Union

Evi Kostakou — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:13:00 GMT

EWORX took up the re-design and implementation of the new Hellenic American Union Portal. The two main goals of this project have been the definition of a subtle, yet strong online presence and visual identity for HAU and the absolute bilinguality (English and Greek) of the website.

The services and functionality EWORX implemented include the following:

Bilingual Web Site Design and Development with 1-1 mapping of Greek and English pages;
Different websites integrated in the same portal with different aesthetics, home pages, sidebars;
Presentation of Books, Events, Courses, News, Biographies, Resources, Newsletters with specific page types for each of these content categories;
E-commerce mechanism for online ordering of books/publications and booking of courses with appropriate payment module;
Advanced search for Books, Events, Courses;
Registration of members and members area;
Registration to multiple Newsletters simultaneously;
Associate content items with tags and user groups;
Search by tag, user group, item type and website;
Photo galleries, flash animations, Youtube embedded videos;

EWORX has continuously cared about the expansion of HAU Portal. The latest addition is the Bulgarian language, following the opening of new HAU offices in Sofia.

Moreover, EWORX has also taken up the design and implementation of Hellenic American University Portal. We are really proud of the work done here, so go ahead, give it a click and check for yourself!

European Economic and Social Committee

Spyros Michailidis — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:08:00 GMT

The overall aim of the project was to analyse, design and implement the new website of the European Economic and Social Committee (EESC), one of the key European Institutions which sits between the European Parliament, the Commission and the Social Partners. Part of the project was to migrate the vast content from the old website to the new one.

The Eworx team undertook:

The adaptation of the Committee’s graphical charter to digital media (Website, Intranet and Member’s portal)
The application of the adapted graphical charter for the EESC website
The installation of the TOOLIP™ Web Content Management System for the EESC website
The entire redesign and re-structuring of the EESC website
The migration of the content from the old website to the new, involving heavy re-structuring, tagging and thematic classification
The implementation of a global search tool that will allow visitors to search the entire content of the website in various ways and to retrieve relevant results
Staff training and provision of documentation and supporting material associated with the administration and use of the TOOLIP CMS
The annual maintenance of the TOOLIP installation of the EESC website and the updating and maintenance of any supporting material that have been developed.

During the website design process, several prototypes have been evaluated to assess both the proposed Information Architecture and the usability and navigability of the designs. Low-fidelity and high-fidelity prototypes, in addition to wireframes, have been produced and tested within closed user groups, using the appropriate tools.

A lot of attention was placed in content re-structuring. The proposed Information Architecture's primary aim was to effectively promote and render more accessible the vast quantity of content of the website. This was achieved by heavy inter-linking and tagging so that users can retrieve all types of content that share a common theme or attribute. Additionally, new navigation paths were analysed and determined until the new structure of the EESC website was finalized.

While building the website, the Eworx team deployed a number of Methodologies, including:

Task Analysis
Wireframes and Prototyping
Testing / Validation of Wireframes / Prototypes with EESC Stakeholders
Rapid Prototyping
Agile Development

Enet.gr

Georgia Kapralou — Fri, 28 May 2010 11:00:00 GMT

Eleftherotipia is one of the most popular newspapers in Greece. The purpose of this project was to develop and deliver an Online News Portal coupled with a back-end management system for the end-to-end lifecycle managment of news.

In order to address the challenges of a modern e-newspaper EWORX implemented and is continuously implementing a variety of cutting edge features.

Front End Features (News Portal)

Fully customisable news boxes based on news and other information feeds
Advanced search and archive search engines
In addition to the online edition, a full view of the printed edition
An RSS Feed engine, so users can always get up to date news of their interest
Comments functionality
Automatic weather forecasting

Back End Features (News Management System)

article management system (incl. prioritisation, grouping and filtering)
customised views for printed and online editions
embedded article approval workflows
multimedia management (with stand alone resource management functionality)
user and editor management