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Giving Birth to a Personalized Web Site

by Lowell Rapaport

During the initial rush to get on the Internet, most companies were more than happy with Web pages composed of static text and image content. In the second wave, companies learned to update their content regularly so visitors would have a reason to come back. In the third wave, Web sites offered personalized content for individual visitors. By summer 2000, the publishers of Primedia's American Baby magazine, New York, knew they wanted to provide more than personalization through the rebirth of Americanbaby.com.

The original version of Americanbaby.com was basically an online copy of the magazine. Web surfers could go to the site and click on links to articles. "We wanted to find relationships between the content, the advertising and the reader," says Sameer Hutheesing, Primedia's assistant vice president of IT and new media. "This would reach a more focused group of site visitors and let us provide more sophisticated services to our readers and advertisers." Plans also called for online communities, with features like message boards, targeted content, and extensions to related Primedia properties, including video productions and trade shows.

With all these ambitious expectations, the company knew that the technology underlying its old site had to go. It didn't have the power or flexibility for high-end content management or personalized delivery. Primedia put out a request for proposal (RFP) to 10 Web site integrators. A team of writers, editors and marketing professionals evaluated the proposals based on cost, the skills of the integrator and time to implement. "We were on a tight deadline," says Hutheesing. "The site had to be completed in six months."

The company settled on Chicago-based integrator Inforte (www.inforte.com) and design subcontractor Iguana Studios, New York (www.iguanastudios.com). "Inforte wasn't the cheapest bid, but it promised delivery in six months," says Hutheesing.

Inforte started with an intense, 10-week planning process, working with executives, managers and staff from Primedia and American Baby to specify the functionality and the look and feel of the site.

"We based our software recommendations on these demands," says Mark Heil, Inforte's senior consultant and point man on the American Baby project.

The system was built on a core platform consisting of Microsoft's Windows NT operating system, a Sequel Server 7 database and Vignette content management software from Vignette, Austin, TX (www.vignette.com). Microsoft's operating system and Internet Information Server software were chosen to keep costs down, but Heil says the Vignette system is open enough so that if the demands placed on the Web site grow, it can be transferred to high-end Unix servers.

Nine computers were ultimately needed to host the American Baby Web site: three Web servers, two content management servers, two database servers, and one computer each for the search engine and chat/message board servers. The servers are installed at a facility owned by Digex, Beltsville, MD (www.digex.com), a Web site hosting and Internet service provider used by a number of Primedia Web properties.

On top of the Windows/Vignette platform, Inforte added a Texis search engine made by Cleveland-based Thunderstone (www.thunderstone.com) and a chat and message board application from Eshare Expressions, Norcross, GA (www.eshare.com). Ads are delivered by DoubleClick, New York, and newsfeeds by Screaming Media (www.screamingmedia.com), also of New York. With the exception of Eshare Expressions, which comes with its own HTML interface, the content from all these applications is routed through templates served by Vignette.

"We recommended Vignette for this project because of its personalization features and because of Vignette's focus on publishing," said Heil. News items from Screaming Media are downloaded and automatically archived in Vignette's repository and can be searched along with Americanbaby.com's own content. The internal mechanism for posting content on the American Baby Web site is simple. American Baby staff writers and editors type or paste textual content and images into Vignette's Content Management Server. Workflow is similarly kept simple. Most content posted to the site only passes across one editor's desk before being finalized. All interaction with the system takes place through a Web interface.

One of the most important elements of the American Baby site had to be custom built. The American Baby team wanted to be able to deliver content based on the stage of the woman's pregnancy or the baby's age up to two years. An extension to Vignette had to be written to check the baby's due date stored in a cookie on the visitor's computer. Based on this information, Vignette could request more focused content from its internal repository and advertisements from DoubleClick's ad servers.

The design-and-build stage of the project took 20 weeks, although Heil says the actual coding of the site took only about five weeks. The majority of the development time was spent on detailed engineering of each element of the system, from the structure of the content repository to the HTML coding of the templates. A small amount of content from American Baby's old Web site was recycled into the new site. The final cost of the system was about $2.5 million.

Hutheesing of Primedia says the development of the Web site went smoothly and delivered on all its goals despite the tight six-month schedule. He credits Inforte's preparation, before a single line of code was even written; he adds that the American Baby team maintained restraint in requesting changes once the project was started. Future plans for the Web site include possible greater integration between production of the American Baby Web site and the magazine and inclusion of richer multimedia content.