In-Depth
Trader Online!
Ever search for a specific type of car, say a 1952 Volkswagen Beetle, in one of the hundreds of used car listings? Trader Publishing Company, Norfolk, Va., which weekly publishes 300 such guides is looking to make searching for the Beetle in a haystack a little easier with its online presence Trader Online!
Trader Online! (www.traderonline.com) is an Internet-based version of all of Trader Publishings’ publications complete with detailed searching ability. The potential car-buying public can search as many as 500,000 car listings. "We have cars from 97% of the country," said Joe Fuller, operations manager of Trader’s Electronic Media Department.
The first incarnation of Trader Online! was built mainly of static Web pages that were difficult at best to keep maintained, said Fuller. The system was redeployed in May 1997 after six developers redeveloped the site using Bedford, Mass.-based Progress Software Corp.’s WebSpeed development tool and Progress database. "Now, over 90% of the site is generated dynamically," Fuller said. Seven developers maintain the site, adding pages daily and collecting data from Trader’s 90 offices nationwide. Fuller said that on average, Trader Online! processes more than one search request per second.