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pakwheels.com solution study

PakWheels.com was formed in 2003 under the umbrella of Pak eVentures. With over a
100,000 registered users, Pakwheels has become the largest community based
automobile website in Pakistan.

Through Pakwheels, users can search classifieds, research about brand new cars,
discuss car related issues with other members, share information, pictures, videos, etc.

Confiz Solutions is the technology partner for Pakwheels.com

Synapse
Understanding the challenge, solution, and outcome
Challenge
Scalability and Performance
Making the community-portal
scalable and reliable. Ensuring
the ease of integrating social
media features and designing
stable architecture for further
enhancements.
Since it has to be a high-traffic
portal we need to optimize the
performance of the core
modules.
Legacy technologies
Migration from legacy
technology to incorporate
sophisticated community
management features.
Licensing costs of SQLServer,
Windows Server, ASP
application plugins is significant.
Hypothesis:
Expanding community would
result in more traffic. This being
an inductive process, directly
enforce the need for a more
scalable solution.
Solution
Move from legacy ASP/SQL
server platforms to scalable,
web 2.0 technologies.
Three step evolution:
• Migration to Ruby on Rails/
MySQL technologies for core
development. Amazon
Services for optimizations
and quality assurance.
• Integration of off the shelf
forum software, vBulletin for
Forums
• Single Sign On integration
using LDAP with the Pak
eVentures umbrella products.
Results
Managed community
Sophisticated forum software
resulted in better management of
community, more features for
users, resulting in better user
retention
Scalability and reliability:
• Over 10 million page views.
• Over 100,000 registered user,
and growing.
• A million visitors a month.
Total Cost of Ownership (TCO)
Getting on the open-source
technologies stack reduced our
TCO significantly.
Aggressive Roadmap
Migration to cutting-edge
technology opened a wide array
of possibilities. Pakweels
envisions an aggressive and
ambitious road map.
Migration to cutting edge open-source technologies
Ruby on Rails/MySQL for core development.

Migration
The original solution designed for Pakwheels was based on ASP and SQL Server 2000
technologies. The solution designed was not based on high performance modules and a
scalable architecture.

Images to Amazon services

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon
Web Services. Using this, we ensure efficient use of bandwidth and scalable file storage
system.

Data Migration
This being the most significant step to completing the migration required a smooth and
stable solution. Data had to be migrated from MS SQL Server 2000 platform to MySQL.

Recovery mechanism design

To make sure that there is no data loss in an extremely unlikely case of system downtime,
we worked out a recovery mechanism that makes the solution even more reliable.

User experience design - Community feel

More community features, Enhance traffic, Better users retention.

The basic idea was to build feature requirements and interaction plans based upon the
user’s goals. Pakwheels interactive system is meant to positively impact the overall
experience of it’s users.

• Wire framing and Story boarding based on actual user input.

• Flows and navigation maps designed based on user stories and scenarios.
 • A/B testing was performed to ensure that the newer version performs better on
business goals.
• Forums were audited by select social groups. This helped us facilitate notable
user behaviors.
• Optimization: Better placement of widgets, page components, and search
elements resulted in better experience.

The interaction design makes the community features more effective. The users of the
forums actually add value to the community which makes the portal community-centric.

One stop shop solution

Single Sign-On integration within Pak eVentures umbrella products.

Pak eVentures umbrella products include,

• PakWheels - #1 automobile website in Pakistan dealing in classifieds and a

wealth of auto-related information
• PakBoard - a classifieds platform for everything you can think of: laptops,
mobiles, real estate, services etc. The craigslist of Pakistan.
• PakShops - prop up your own shop online. Give your business presence on
the web by setting up a shop or.... simply take your garage sale online

These are all high-traffic content-rich portals that are designed to form and engage
communities. Due to single sign-on integration the user can now access all solutions
while maintaining a single profile.

Feature enhancement and Change management

Aggressive roadmap.

Rapid development makes change management effective.

PakWheels has been developed using agile methodologies. This makes it easier for us to
incorporate new features or modify existing features at any time we want.

Community features
PakWheels envisions an aggressive and ambitious roadmap. We bank on our scalable
and reliable solution to grow. Being an off-the-shelf solution, vBulletin has made the
forums extremely extensible. With traffic consistently on the up, we can already see users
adding value to the whole automobile community.