Social Networking Website Development for Travellers A Case Study

A software development company developed a social networking website in travel domain for its customer. The customer was a group of first generation entrepreneurs. These were travel enthusiasts who shared a common vision to provide technology enabled services to tourists and travelers. They wished to build a niche social networking website in travel domain and capitalize on Internet based advertising.

This project proposed to empower an incredible number of French speaking travellers to collaborate and communicate on travel related issues through a single website which has been missing from the landscape. The project required certain out of the box features important for travellers besides standard social media web design.

The client said "the site should narrate traveler's stories and help them make informed decisions. It is not about searching rooms"

The program company and the Client decided to develop the web site using open source technology on Blogging platforms 2.0. After detailed discussions, it was made a decision to develop this social networking website on LAMP platform (Linux, Apache, MySql and PHP) platform on MVC architecture. AJAX, XML and Jquerry were found in certain functionalities to make the web site fast. The decision of open source technologies for development of social networking website reduced the budget as it eliminated the need to buy any software licence.

Development Methodology

The technology team prepared a detail feature list based on clients business objectives. This was analysed and converted into software specification. The SRS document was created and revised to create it as objective as possible before kick start of the project.

Software company's team continually communicated with the client to discuss the developed features and gave demonstration of the working software. The team also was also proactive to the changes requested by the client during development. This collaborative approach for social networking web development in India allowed an instant development and shorter time and energy to market.

The web site provided a platform that facilitates "viral" proliferation of information passed along from user to user. The features were developed remember the ease of use, trends and specific need of the travelers. read more of the features in the web site are:

1. Traveller profile

2. Travelogue

3. Share, tag Photos and Videos

4. Share Guidelines

5. Review Travel Destinations

6. Review & Rate Hotels, Tour operators, Shops, Restaurants,

7. Destination/travel based Groups and Communities

8. Integration with Google Maps

9. Recommendation on "To accomplish" and "To See" at a specific destination.

10. Tagging & Tag cloud

The website helped to build a travel community through collaboration among travelers. It provided them with simple to operate helpful tools to connect to one another and share their stories and media. Since this is a distinct segment space, company was able to generate revenue leveraging on the rapidly growing traffic.

Monica Rai works with ESS. Eastern Software Systems (ESS) is a leading software services and products company having a presence in more than 25 countries. ESS is CMM Level 5 company and ISO 9001:2008 certified. At ESS we've the experience, the expertise and the resources to respond to the initial challenges and opportunities that are associated with providing top quality IT solutions in the extremely competitive business environment of today.

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