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CIOZone officially launched its mobile product this week, providing our community of chief information officers and IT executives with access to the latest technology news, research, and peer-to-peer networking tools directly from their mobile devices.
CIOZone officially launched its mobile product this week, providing our community of chief information officers and IT executives with access to the latest technology news, research, and peer-to-peer networking tools directly from their mobile devices.
The mobile product is based on open source technology and was developed in-house by the CIOZone technology team. James Lee, IT specialist and ad operations manager, headed the project. We asked James to provide our members with some insights into the initiative.
If you have any questions you'd like to ask James, please post them in the comment section at the bottom and he will be happy to respond.
Question: James, why did CIOZone undertake the mobile product initiative?
Answer: With a lot of site analysis last year we discovered that some of our members were trying to access the site using their mobile phones or devices. The bounce rate was pretty high meaning that only those with smartphones that could adapt to a non-mobile friendly website would be able to navigate and view the content.
Since most of our members deal with technology and are senior managers and above, that demographic is a prime target as being users of smartphones and mobile devices. So it was not a question of, "Do we need a mobile solution?", but rather, "When can we deliver a mobile solution?"
Question: What was the development process and timetable behind the launch?
Answer: Most of the discussions took place in February and the actual development took place in March. It was a quick development cycle at about 12 days to meet the initial requirements. A soft launch took place on March 23.
Question: CIOZone is built on an open source platform. Were you able to find a ready-made open source offering to create the product?
Answer: Utilizing Joomla as our CMS (content management system) and Web platform, our initial search was for a seamless Joomla component that we could just install and be good to go. We did find one solution which comprised of a mobile friendly template but required duplication of the site and a redirect in place to send our mobile viewers to. This lead to duplicate databases that would need to be synced in a timely manner in order for the content to be fresh.
After some discussion we decided that a custom solution was best. One that we could run off a single database that would pull in the latest content as it was being inserted for the main website. Also, the initial requirements were to make available our most frequented content, that being the latest stories, blogs and forum posts.
Alongside the content requirements were the advertising requirements. As with the main site we have been sticking with IAB (Interactive Advertising Bureau) standards, so it was easy just to follow their recommendations.
Question: Can you provide a bit more information on what's happening behind the scenes. For example, when a person visits CIOZone using their smartphone, how does the system know which version of the site to deliver—that is, the standard version, or the mobile version.
Answer: You can either enter www.ciozone.com or m.ciozone.com and either one will detect whether you're on a mobile device or not and send you to the appropriate site.
Question: What are the next steps for the mobile product?
Answer: Since we pride ourselves on being a business social site as well as providing our members with great content, the future goal for the mobile edition is to include more features to facilitate member communication and networking.
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