e-Forex Magazine

e-Forex Magazine

http://www.e-forex.net

I have been working closely with Charles Jago and the team at e-Forex magazine for around two years now, Charles first contacted me because he felt that his current website was falling too far behind the current website standards of his competitors so I created a complete new package for the project that included some great AJAX and Flash based animation effects backed up with some powerful server side scripting.

Before the project was turned over to us the majority of the content on the site was locked off to the public, until they either signed up for a three day trial or paid for a full subscription.  The disadvantage of this was that although the magazine has been successfully printed for over five years (around 20 issues) and contained thousands of pages of content none of this was getting indexed by Google.  I suggested to Charles that perhaps a different approach should be employed.  Give away to everyone all of the news items, these are basically only press releases and old news is just that.  This easily multiplied the amount of content that Google indexed by a factor of 10,000. Then I suggested that perhaps all of the articles from the magazine should be partially available to google and free users, just one or two paragraphs but enough to provide Google with the keywords and content needed to accurately index and then rank the pages due to their relative content.  Again this proved very successful.

Late in 2008 Charles needed to update the entire structure and way that e-Forex distributed and reported on Forex news and video content.  In our discussions it was decided that to make e-Forex and essential daily read for all this meant that the website should have multiple sources of content that were updated on an daily (instead of quarterly) basis.  So I used the open source SimplePie PHP RSS feed parser to aggregate news items from around ten different news sources, four different video sources and many (many) blog sources to increase the amount of content available on e-Forex at least by a hundred fold. These news sources were then integrated into our main news database so that end users could use the main website search engine to find the items that they required.  The extensibility of this system means that we can now add many many more news sources very easily as they become available.  

e-Forex News and Articles Search Engine

e-Forex Search engine

The e-Forex search engine is as comprehensive as I can possible make, and whilst it is not an engine that can even see Google as a target to measure against, I feel that it does the job capably.  Due to the fact that a lot of companies and terms in the banking sector have names that are three characters (USD, GBP for example) I could not simply use MYSQL fulltext function to perform searches, this lead to a number of drawbacks - mostly speed.  So i made some changes to the way in which news items are added to the site and also to the search engine code and now search terms of 3 characters plus return good and accurate results.

Building on this I created a system so that each news item also displays relevent alternative stories based on the main keywords mentioned.  This had a knock on effect of also automatically generatign some good keywords for the search engines to use with their ranking systems. Although this is no where near to what a dedicated SEO expert could achieve it is a much cheaper alternative.

e-Forex Video Player

Custom video player

Although we source the majority of our video from external source I still wanted to give the user a consistant player interface.  This meant that I needed to hit onto the raw source flv or mp4 file from whatever video hosting service the publisher decided to use.  Luckily this was mostly YouTube, due to its cheap price and overwhelming distibution network. This enabled me to hit on a single RSS feed and return not only a HQ video file but also the title and content for each item.  I then purchased a licence for the fantastic JW FLV Player and skinned it so that it fit in with the e-Forex theme.

Conclusion

Basically I gave the entire e-Forex site a complete overhaul and update, and feel quite pleased with the results.  As a consequence of this the visits have increased dramatically and subscriptions are up. 

Vibrant Web Design Solutions Brighton

email: john@vibrant-solutions.net

web: http://vibrant-solutions.net

tel: +44 (0) 207 183 4031

mobile: +44 (0) 794 8168 437

msn: john@vibrant-solutions.net