Sky News
The Idea
Skynews.com.au approached Mammoth with a request for a page on their news website which would be able to provide informative demographics provided by the Australian Bureau of Statistics. This would be used as a “value added service” to provide additional sources of revenue via sponsored advertising. People visiting the page can look up their suburb or any suburb in Australia and find out the median income, median monthly mortgage for the area, media weekly rent, and any other publically known demographic information provided by the ABS via the last census.
The Approach
One of the major requirements was that we needed to provide the website as low-cost as possible whilst keeping with the style of the skynews.com.au website. Skynews would need to manually manage some sponsored banner advertising on the page which is separate from their existing Banner Ads so they could theme the page for a particular sponsor. They also wanted to provide several mortgage and loan calculators from mortgage choice. A sub-domain hosted via Mammoth Networks would tick all of these boxes, an integrated solution was going to be more expensive to develop.
The Solution
To keep costs down we opted to host the site via Mammoth Networks. Essentially a .NET 4 MVC website which communicates via Umbraco CMS to manage the additional banner ads. The header and footer of the website was provided as iframes onto the site which allowed skynews to update their menus without requiring additional developer intervention. The mortgage choice calculators were also loaded via iframes so they could be updated by mortgage choice also without any intervention on our part.
With so many iframes being loaded on the page, banner advertising, header/footer, calculators, google maps performance and bandwidth was a major problem as there are hard limits in modern browsers to limit the number of concurrent connections available and so page performance suffered. To get around this we opted to perform lazy loading of all iframes that were below the fold, this increased performance of the page 10 fold to acceptable levels.
Technologies
Umbraco CMS
ASP.NET MVC 4
Javascript, JQuery
Google Maps
Lazy Loading
Mammoth Networks – Hosting
