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Breaking free from an old school and outdated design, we decided to follow the latest and greatest design language, developed from Google, with user friendliness at the core of its focus and famous for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