Alfavita News Portal Logo

The Biggest Greek Educational Portal

AlfaVita

The biggest educational portal in Greece had to be redesigned from the ground up with two goals in mind. Be relevant and fast!
Screenshot of the case study page inside an 27 inch iMac
Alfavita homepage full screenshot

Objective

Design and develop a very fast and clean magazine type website for one of the biggest portals of Greece serving millions of users each month.

Solution

We designed a clean design following Google's material design language that is developed to be fast, efficient and scalable

How it was made

The Design

Breaking free from an old school and outdated design, we decided to follow the latest and greatest design language, developed from Google, with user friendliness at the core of its focus and famous for its clean design specs.

We thought that this, card like, layout would be ideal for a website that has vast amount of information to show and at the same time not feel cluttered by all this content. The color scheme was chosen according to the company colors and by matching it with material design color schemes.

Screenshot of alfavita material design homepage
Alfavita material design single article page screenshot

The System

For a complicated website like this, with thousands of articles, specialized pages, multiple editors and many more, a very robust CMS system was necessary.

Our team considering all business needs chose the enterprise Drupal CMS, which offers everything a premium CMS has to offer. It's the most secure, highly customizable, infinitely scalable and most importantly, open source.

As part of our involvement to Drupal community and development we have a complete knowledge of the system and can leverage all its advanced features for any project, no matter how complicated might be.

The template was handcrafted and coded from scratch, from our front end developer and was completely custom. In all steps of the template our focus was always on having the smallest footprint in order to keep the website as light as possible. Something that is very hard to do when these kind of sites rely on advertising to make a living.

The Infrastructure

Alfavita.gr is one of the biggest news sites of Greece. During peak periods it serves more than 12 million visitors per month. Yes you heard that right, 12000000 visitors per month during peak periods using analytics data. During peak times we have seen 4000 - 5000 concurrent users in analytics.

For that to work we needed to set up a very custom server stack to make it function correctly at all times. We employed tools like Varnish cache, Percona db, nginx, php-fpm, memcache, load balancers and more to keep things fast and smooth.

We are proud to have kept loading times for the website at under 3s for 80% of the time, ads included! For as long as the website was hosted in our infrastructure it had an certified SLA of 99.9%

Alfavita material design category page screenshot

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Personal Data Handling

Web Site Terms and Conditions of Use

1. Terms

By accessing this web site, you are agreeing to be bound by these web site Terms and Conditions of Use, all applicable laws and regulations, and agree that you are responsible for compliance with any applicable local laws. If you do not agree with any of these terms, you are prohibited from using or accessing this site. The materials contained in this web site are protected by applicable copyright and trade mark law.

2. Use License

  1. Permission is granted to temporarily download one copy of the materials (information or software) on wefixit's web site for personal, non-commercial transitory viewing only. This is the grant of a license, not a transfer of title, and under this license you may not:
    1. modify or copy the materials;
    2. use the materials for any commercial purpose, or for any public display (commercial or non-commercial);
    3. attempt to decompile or reverse engineer any software contained on wefixit's web site;
    4. remove any copyright or other proprietary notations from the materials; or
    5. transfer the materials to another person or "mirror" the materials on any other server.
  2. This license shall automatically terminate if you violate any of these restrictions and may be terminated by wefixit at any time. Upon terminating your viewing of these materials or upon the termination of this license, you must destroy any downloaded materials in your possession whether in electronic or printed format.

3. Payments

  1. All payments are final and non-refundable including deposits and installments. Invoices are issued when the whole service amount has been paid in full. The services on wefixit's web site are provided "as is". wefixit makes no warranties, expressed or implied, and hereby disclaims and negates all other warranties, including without limitation, implied warranties or conditions of merchantability, fitness for a particular purpose, or non-infringement of intellectual property or other violation of rights. Further, wefixit does not warrant or make any representations concerning the accuracy, likely results, or reliability of the use of the materials on its Internet web site or otherwise relating to such services or on any sites linked to this site.

4. Limitations

In no event shall wefixit or its suppliers be liable for any damages (including, without limitation, damages for loss of data or profit, or due to business interruption,) arising out of the use or inability to use the materials on wefixit's Internet site, even if wefixit or a wefixit authorized representative has been notified orally or in writing of the possibility of such damage. Because some jurisdictions do not allow limitations on implied warranties, or limitations of liability for consequential or incidental damages, these limitations may not apply to you.

5. Revisions and Errata

The materials appearing on wefixit's web site could include technical, typographical, or photographic errors. wefixit does not warrant that any of the materials on its web site are accurate, complete, or current. wefixit may make changes to the materials contained on its web site at any time without notice. wefixit does not, however, make any commitment to update the materials.

6. Links

wefixit has not reviewed all of the sites linked to its Internet web site and is not responsible for the contents of any such linked site. The inclusion of any link does not imply endorsement by wefixit of the site. Use of any such linked web site is at the user's own risk.

7. Site Terms of Use Modifications

wefixit may revise these terms of use for its web site at any time without notice. By using this web site you are agreeing to be bound by the then current version of these Terms and Conditions of Use.

8. Governing Law

Any claim relating to wefixit's web site shall be governed by the laws of the State of Patras without regard to its conflict of law provisions.

General Terms and Conditions applicable to Use of a Web Site.

Privacy Policy

Your privacy is very important to us. Accordingly, we have developed this Policy in order for you to understand how we collect, use, communicate and disclose and make use of personal information. The following outlines our privacy policy.

  • Before or at the time of collecting personal information, we will identify the purposes for which information is being collected.
  • We will collect and use of personal information solely with the objective of fulfilling those purposes specified by us and for other compatible purposes, unless we obtain the consent of the individual concerned or as required by law.
  • We will only retain personal information as long as necessary for the fulfillment of those purposes.
  • We will collect personal information by lawful and fair means and, where appropriate, with the knowledge or consent of the individual concerned.
  • Personal data should be relevant to the purposes for which it is to be used, and, to the extent necessary for those purposes, should be accurate, complete, and up-to-date.
  • We will protect personal information by reasonable security safeguards against loss or theft, as well as unauthorized access, disclosure, copying, use or modification.
  • We will make readily available to customers information about our policies and practices relating to the management of personal information.

We are committed to conducting our business in accordance with these principles in order to ensure that the confidentiality of personal information is protected and maintained.

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