A-Lehdet
Demi.fi – Doubling the amount of visitors with new look and features
Demi is among the most popular teenage girl magazines in Finland. The magazine has a completely different life in web, as demi.fi is clearly the most popular web service for that target group with over 3 million weekly page loads.
A-lehdet wanted to redo the whole Demi service on novel technologies and update the design to present day at the same time. In addition to keeping all the old features a number of new functionality was planned.
User Intelligence drove the design together with Demi users, Demi editorial staff and Exove as the technology vendor.
The starting points were to keep the old liked features, e.g. discussions, group sites and own profile pages, but to improve them further with requests from the users, e.g. social features.
Drupal 7 was selected as the platform because of the many features it offers out-of-the-box or as contrib modules. In addition, with design progress Exove created tens of custom modules to serve the Demi-specific user needs.
Website renewal
New technologies and visual update brought more users to the site
Demi.fi doubled their visitors to 90,000 people per week after the upgrade. Customer experience and fast respond time were the enablers for the great growth.
The technology selection is Nginx as server, MongoDB and MySQL as databases, Apache Solr as the search engine and fast data storage, Memcached and APC for fast caching and Varnish as http accelerator.
Exove implemented the new Demi.fi as a responsive service that works with desktop computers and mobile devices.
It responds fast even under the massive amount of page loads and concurrent users. The result has been satisfying to the users.
According to Markkinointi & Mainonta newspaper, Demi.fi has doubled its unique weekly visitors to whopping 90,000 people after the service was upgraded.
The implementation project was in scrum mode, with Exove development team collaborating closely with A-lehdet project development team and Demi editorial staff.
