Aplyca USA

Hotels at per diem is a lodging website that provides government and military travelers with a localized selection of hotel rooms that fall within the government per diem rates provided for that area in the United States and Canada.

Some of their challenges included redesigning website to increase traffic and monetization, reducing administration time in managing listing customers, providing enhanced search experience with location-based searching and creating revenue-producing advertising solutions that range from free to platinum.

Hotels at per diem chose Aplyca and implemented the Aplyca Business Listing and Classified solution that is already a success in powering newspaper classifieds for Vanguardia. They customized the solution for the hotel listing needs and sales process and Collaborated with UBM Aviation on styling and site deployment.

Some highlighted eZ features and functionality include:
For the user:
● Implemented eZ Find with Ajax-powered searches for a more responsive experience
● Created Metro Search solution to facilitate proximity searches around major city centers

Business Listing:
● Automatic order renewal
● Integration with Cybersource
● Full ordering capabilities with credit card and offline billing

For UBM Aviation:
● Order filtering and exporting for ERP integration
● eZ Publish framework and mySQL/PHP implementation for custom development
● eZ CMS and Aplyca solution for business listings and classifieds

The results have been great with increased revenue through scalability of ads and photos and decreased operating expenses of website by cutting staff time. Before the hotel staff used to fill out listings, and now purchasers can do it. Also, the hospitality chains can manage multiple hotels from account.

"The Aplyca Business Listing solution, powered by eZ Publish CMS provides a solid combination of content complexity and the support for sophisticated business rules," Jason Shadlock, Director of Digital Marketing and Web Development at UBM Aviation Worldwide said.

DC Shoes is a multi-country, multi-lingual site that embraces action sports content in an experience that encourages exploration through enticing visuals and e-commerce integration for six sports. Substantially integrated with social media. Owned by Quiksilver (NYSE: ZQK), the company provides high-demand brands, such as Quiksilver, DC Shoes and Roxy, that sell a vibrant lifestyle, as the company evolves from skateboard gear (still its main business) to lifestyle recreational products.

Some of the challenges DC Shoes faced was that the International sites had to create and maintain their own platforms, content was not shared effectively because of separate platforms for brands and sports and they had high agency and internal costs for site maintenance and updates because of disparate platforms.

The objective of this project was to create and manage multiple portals worldwide to facilitate global content sharing, integrate with e-commerce, product information database systems and social media, have an extended eZ Content workflow engine to facilitate preview and approval of evolving content and embed a Quiksilver developer on the Aplyca team to acquire an understanding of solution’s functionality and evolution possibilities.

Some highlighted eZ features and functionality include:
● Built on a core CMS platform, the content revolves around DC’s product direction and simple social integration that create a link to the company’s nearly 6 million Facebook fans.
● Site supports seven main sections, each in four different languages, that results in more than 150 unique sections, with dozens of galleries, videos and articles.
● Main background image is separated into foreground and background to maintain quality while scaling.
● Back end is highly customized Amazon Web Services cluster running PHP, Varnish accelerator and Apache.

Since its launch, the site has had increased response time while tripling graphic and video content. The new site also resulted in enhanced global content sharing to allow selective or massive sharing of existing or new content for international sites, improved workflow processes to facilitate preview and approval of multiple content versions and product integration from GSI Commerce and Microsoft e-commerce platforms. DC Shoes was also chosen as the Web Pick of the Week: http://www.commarts.com/web-sites/shoes.html.

“Everyone has a very high regard for Aplyca both inside the eZ project and additionally outside of it. Aplyca is a true star," Gary Penn, Interactive Director of DC Shoes, Quiksilver, Roxy said. "We have pared nearly 25 percent from our site homepage load time with no errors/glitches. Our images are larger; we have more promos and yet we've reduced time to load - that's nothing short of spectacular.”

OPSA is the publisher of La Prensa, Honduras’ largest newspaper and top-ranked domestic website, and two other websites, El Heraldo and Diario Diez, that are ranked among the Top 5 in the country.

Their challenges were to move the newspaper website to an enterprise-grade platform, create high traffic to deal with increasing popularity and periodic peaks, analyze and migrate more than 60,000 articles, images and videos from flat files and legacy databases and train onsite staff to develop spinoff products and specialty sites.

Aplyca focused on creating strong architecture supporting multiples sites, replicating and improving functionality, optimizing for performance and peak traffic endurance and training OPSA-La Prensa for eZ Publish development.

Some highlighted eZ features and functionality include:
● eZ Publish implementation for media
● Content migration
● Web Accelerator /CDN
● Integrated Lucene, Java-based enterprise search engine

La Prensa has topped more than 1.2 million visits per month and more than 500 requests per second. They also won the Site of the Month award on ez.no and was nominated for Project of the Year at the eZ awards in 2007.

In addition, Aplyca-trained developers at La Prensa built two additional newspaper portals (El Heraldo and Diez) that quickly managed to dominate the Top 5 domestic sites in the country. Within a few months of its launch, Diario Diez broke into the top 25,000 Alexa-ranked sites. The eZ Publish system for La Prensa handled more than 2,000 requests per second, four times the site’s average, during the TACA Flight 390 air crash at Tegucigalpa airport that killed five people.

“Aplyca has been a very important strategic partner for our companies," Rafael Guevara, New Media Manager for Grupo Editorial OPSA said. "Their involvement has gone beyond a service contract. Aplyca has shown authentic interest in helping us achieve our business goals through their experience and insight.”