Toronto.com

Challenge

Torstar Digital operates 40 online properties including some of Canada's most popular Web sites, such as Toronto.com, TheStar.com, and Metroland, which publishes community newspapers and city/town sites across southern Ontario. The cost and productivity related to Web site maintenance was a growing concern for Torstar, so they embarked on a strategy to build a single platform on which all its online properties would be based to ensure they could more easily share content and functionality. The team targeted Toronto.com (700,000 unique visitors each month) as the first site to undergo this revision, since its legacy infrastructure made it impossible for administrators to share or reuse content from other Torstar sites.

Solution

imason provided strategy consulting to the business and IT sides of Torstar Digital. We worked with the CTO, the CEO of Toronto.com and the team that supports the portal business to map out how Microsoft technologies can help them, the future direction of the technology and its relevance to their business.

imason's proposal and subsequent implementation of moving to a .NET Framework-based platform established it as a flexible and robust solution that proved to immediately add business value to one of Canada's premiere online city guides, and its sister online properties which target over 7 million Canadians. Before implementing the Microsoft platform, Torstar Digital developers spent large amounts of time building frameworks in an effort to add new site content, which could not be reused by the many online properties operated by the company. By taking advantage of the .NET Framework 2.0, Torstar developed a single platform on which all sites would be based to ensure its online properties could more easily share content and functionality, while cutting development time.

Result

Achievements of moving Toronto.com to the .NET Framework include:

• Technical goal of the site was to attain 300 service requests per second; solution actually hits over 500 requests per second
• Page load response time is now under two seconds versus over five prior to the implementation
• Content administrators can use a pre-made Master Page layout and develop a custom look and feel that reflects the site and its audience. As a result, new sections are added in hours versus weeks or even months typical prior to the implementation

Right after launching, Toronto.com added more new content in the first three months than in the past four years combined! The shared platform now enables smaller market sites with fewer resources to quickly incorporate features and content found on the larger, more popular sites of TheStar.com and Toronto.com.

Related

• Case study on Microsoft.com