Associated New Media (ANM)

• March 12, 2001

(seated) Joann Weedon, Kenn Jordan and Matthew Clifford (standing) Robert Boyle and Emmanuel Mrakpor

In June 1999, Associated New Media (ANM), the London-based Internet division of Daily Mail General Trust and publisher of the ThisIsLondon.com, ThisIsMoney.- com and UKPlus.com sites, decided to broaden its horizons and test another market. "ANM identified that a women's destination site in the U.K. is one of the most crucial areas of the Internet marketplace to own," said Kenn Jordan, technical and design director, "tying in with the highly female bias of its national newspaper titles to allow for extensive cross-promotion and co-advertising deals."

But more than just tapping into another U.K. market, Charlotte- Street.com provided ANM with a way to centralize the development of all of its Web sites. In order to create CharlotteStreet.com, ANM created an engine that allows it to design, develop and manage interactive Web sites.

Prior to CharlotteStreet.com, all of ANM's development work was prototyped internally and then given to an external team who built and hosted it. CharlotteStreet.com was ANM's first completely internal venture, laying the groundwork for future internal development.

Although successful, the project, which began at the end of June 1999, took longer than anticipated. The team had hoped to finish before the end of September, but had to push their original deadline back. In the end, CharlotteStreet.com did not go live until October 11, 1999, approximately 3.5 months after its inception.

The project's major technical challenge was meeting the need for one content database that was able to serve multiple presentation devices at the same time. Editorial content was to be captured once and presented to any device making a request. Two devices identified for phase one of the project were Web browsers using HTML and Web browsers using Macromedia Flash. In the future, ANM plans to use WebTV and digital TV, mobile phones and personal digital assistants.

To meet the content database challenge, the project team developed a device detection system and a content markup scheme. The content markup tags let the editorial team choose what parts of an article or feature are available for what devices. This required viewing an editorial piece as an object made up of other objects. For example, a feature is made up of paragraphs and, by using the content markup scheme, pagination and layout can be controlled.

The team used SilverStream for application development and as a Web application server, and Oracle 8.05 was used as content, object and code store. Macromedia Dreamweaver was used in HTML and DHTML page production, while Macromedia Flash and Macromedia Generator were used in Flash development and as a Flash movie generator. CorelDraw handled vector graphics production, while Adobe PhotoShop dealt with graphics production. Adobe ImageReady and JASC PaintShop Pro were used in graphics optimization. Products were chosen based on robustness, scalability, reliability, ease of use, and speed of implementation/integration with other systems. All of the Web surfing takes place on Windows NT.

The development team also used Visio for diagramming, ERwin and Microsoft Excel for data modeling, Microsoft Word for document production, and Microsoft Project for creating project plans that were also exported as Web pages.

Now that CharlotteStreet.com has proven successful, ANM can use the same concepts to redevelop its other Web sites internally. ANM has successfully revamped its UKPlus.com site, building it on the same architecture as CharlotteStreet.com, using an Oracle database and SilverStream. Developers have also started working on the ThisIsLondon.com site.

The biggest benefit of developing internally, said Jordan, is not being reliant on a development resource and the timing of an external company. "We have to move very quickly," he explained. "It's difficult for us to properly plan that when we're reliant on an external company." In addition, by developing all of its sites internally, ANM can track users across all the sites. Internal development also provides cheaper bandwidth, added Jordan, having the sites "all in one pipe, rather than four big pipes."
— Lana Gates