Offervault

Julian and his team have been top notch in getting all of our development done on a timely basis as well as handling all on-going support and customer issues. I know I can always count on them to pull me through whenever I need them. Mark Roth

Customer: Offer Vault/ Denmar Management, LLC

Geography: USA

Industry: Affiliate Marketing

Challenges:

• Create an impeccable designed skin
• Needed to rewrite the language
• To provide some feature adjustments and other advanced search features
• To add additional features for a quick load of the site/pages.

Solution: DotKernel, Zend Framework and PHP 5

Background

The main idea about this service was developed by Mark Roth, who started his business with Offer Vault in late 2007, the project being launched in the year of 2008. Every day, millions of people are searching offers from all around the world, are testing different offers from different countries using Proxy, hoping to find something suitable for their own business ideas. Using the Offer Vault interface, simply type in keywords the wanted word(s) and the results returned will show keyword relevant offers from member networks. As an affiliate marketer, the number of choices you find available can seem dreadful, but having Offer Vault as your first option, this job can be simpler than it seems.

The Challenge

Denmar Management owns and operates the tool used only by members and affiliates to easily locate their offers and their payouts from different networks. In the meantime, while the website is hosting about 39,000 offers from circa 110 affiliate networks and generating millions of keywords per section, there are always some things that need improvement. Let me tell you exactly how it worked: the site needed some new keywords, an artistic-like skin and, of course, due to the fact that in time the old version of script language used to crash, it needed a new script language, too. So, to facilitate day-to-day searching for network affiliates marketers and for members also, Offer Vault looked to expand and improve site's functionality. Originally, Offer Vault had its own business grown, but shortly found itself with a workable, yet not an optimal solution for a bright and persisting future. This is were DotBoost team came with a better proposal for all that means Offer Vault business and its prosperity in time.

DotBoost's Involvement

DotBoost team chose to start with implementing new features and that meant changing the webinar module with a new one, then generating some new keywords in order to facilitate the search, making a Proxy module, so that the client can view worldwide offers through a simple connection and, in the end, implementing a tool that shows the newest Demographic Statistics.

Even so, minor changes can bring challenges with major results. After one and a half year of working on this project, DotBoost encountered their first issue. It seemed that programming on the old version of script language made the entire project less stable, discouraging teamwork, showing no signs of progression on the project, and eventually crashed. Thus, the project needed a new architecture. Luckily, DotBoost was developing for some years its own framework, entirely based on Zend Framework. DotKernel enterprise great architecture was ready to be applied on Offer Vault. Nevertheless, in order to progress with their teamwork, especially when on the project works simultaneously more than 1 people, DotBoost extensively used SVN (a software versioning and a revision control system ), as development tool, which had a huge impact not only on the team but over on the entire project, as well.

Implementation

Since DotBoost adopted DotKernel as the site's main architecture, the implementation of other tools and features was a great success. DotBoost started by introducing a database stored procedure - a method to improve the response time in order to display search results in a real time. In addition, they provided technical documentation of the site and clear information on the structure of database tables.

Over two years as they were working on Offer Vault project, DotBoost team had enough time to focus on trying to reduce load traffic on the site, to find new features to build up a new and easy way to access advanced search and to apply various modules as Proxy offers, fast networks and helpful webinars.

Working with professional Zend Certified engineers and who are ready to adopt the suitable solution in a proper time, can lead to many benefits for both the team and also for the customer. "We've seen a huge progress right about when DotBoost rewrote the script language and adopted their efficient framework based on a new version of PHP and Zend Framework. That was the time when everything they've done in a year and a half on the old script language, paid off in DotKernel in only six months of working."

The Results/Conclusions

Offer Vault was a complex project to work on, which required intensive work, incredible attention, but most important, required to prove the good communication among the clients and programmers who are in charge with the project – a fact that leads in time to efficient and professional ways to handle possible technical issues. We consider that Offer Vault gave us the chance not only to prove our programming skills over the two years spent on working on this project, but also offered us the chance to measure and to improve our experience and knowledge towards PHP, Zend Framework and our in-house platforms and frameworks as DotKernel.

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