PakWheels.com was formed in 2003 under the umbrella of Pak eVentures. With over a 100,000 registered users, Pakwheels has become the largest community based automobile website in Pakistan.

Through Pakwheels, users can search classifieds, research about brand new cars, discuss car related issues with other members, share information, pictures, videos, etc. Confiz Solutions is the technology partner for Pakwheels.com

Challenge	Solution	Results
Scalability and Performance Making the community-portal scalable and reliable. Ensuring the ease of integrating social media features and designing stable architecture for further enhancements. Since it has to be a high-traffic portal we need to optimize the performance of the core modules. Legacy technologies Migration from legacy technology to incorporate sophisticated community management features. Licensing costs of SQLServer, Windows Server, ASP application plugins is significant. Hypothesis: Expanding community would result in more traffic. This being an inductive process, directly enforce the need for a more scalable solution.	Move from legacy ASP/SQL server platforms to scalable, web 2.0 technologies. Three step evolution: Migration to Ruby on Rails/MySQL technologies for core development. Amazon Services for optimizations and quality assurance. Integration of off the shelf forum software, vBulletin for Forums Single Sign On integration using LDAP with the Pak eVentures umbrella products.	Managed community Sophisticated forum software resulted in better management of community, more features for users, resulting in better user retention Scalability and reliability: Over 10 million page views. Over 100,000 registered user, and growing. A million visitors a month. Total Cost of Ownership (TCO) Getting on the open-source technologies stack reduced our TCO significantly. Aggressive Roadmap Migration to cutting-edge technology opened a wide array of possibilities. Pakweels envisions an aggressive and ambitious road map.

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Migration to cutting edge open-source technologies

Ruby on Rails/MySQL for core development.

Migration

The original solution designed for Pakwheels was based on ASP and SQL Server 2000 technologies. The solution designed was not based on high performance modules and a scalable architecture.

Images to Amazon services

Amazon Simple Storage Service (S3) is an online storage web service offered by Amazon Web Services. Using this, we ensure efficient use of bandwidth and scalable file storage system.

Data Migration

This being the most significant step to completing the migration required a smooth and stable solution. Data had to be migrated from MS SQL Server 2000 platform to MySQL.

Recovery mechanism design

To make sure that there is no data loss in an extremely unlikely case of system downtime, we worked out a recovery mechanism that makes the solution even more reliable.

User experience design – Community feel

More community features, Enhance traffic, Better users retention.

The basic idea was to build feature requirements and interaction plans based upon the user’s goals. Pakwheels interactive system is meant to positively impact the overall experience of it’s users.

• Wire framing and Story boarding based on actual user input.
• Flows and navigation maps designed based on user stories and scenarios.
• A/B testing was performed to ensure that the newer version performs better on business goals.
• Forums were audited by select social groups. This helped us facilitate notable user behaviors.
• Optimization: Better placement of widgets, page components, and search elements resulted in better experience.

The interaction design makes the community features more effective. The users of the forums actually add value to the community which makes the portal community-centric.

One stop shop solution

Single Sign-On integration within Pak eVentures umbrella products.

Pak eVentures umbrella products include,

• PakWheels – #1 automobile website in Pakistan dealing in classifieds and a wealth of auto-related information
• PakBoard – a classifieds platform for everything you can think of: laptops, mobiles, real estate, services etc. The craigslist of Pakistan.
• PakShops – prop up your own shop online. Give your business presence on the web by setting up a shop or…. simply take your garage sale online

These are all high-traffic content-rich portals that are designed to form and engage communities. Due to single sign-on integration the user can now access all solutions while maintaining a single profile.

Feature enhancement and Change management

Aggressive roadmap.

Rapid development makes change management effective.

PakWheels has been developed using agile methodologies. This makes it easier for us to incorporate new features or modify existing features at any time we want.

Community features

PakWheels envisions an aggressive and ambitious roadmap. We bank on our scalable and reliable solution to grow. Being an off-the-shelf solution, vBulletin has made the forums extremely extensible. With traffic consistently on the up, we can already see users adding value to the whole automobile community.