Arthur McLean

Background

Time Warner Cable's advertising unit has the primary responsibility of selling ads to be displayed on TV. They have to compete with local over the air programming, and with satellite broadcasters. They conceived the On Demand network of sites as a value-add to offer their customers to make advertising with TWC more appealing than the competitors, and as a portal that could generate it's own stream of revenue.

Challenge

TWC had an impressive list of requirements: searchable business listings with the ability to feature one or several, local event calendar, movie and tv listings (imported from a third party vendor), articles and ads positioned as advice from local experts, contests, and general articles. All of these must be searchable in a meaningful way, identifying the type of result that it is, and allowing users to drill down.

Additionally, it was TWC's hope to roll this out in markets across the country. The product had to be easy to manage, usable by teams of TWC staff across the country, and support an unlimited number of sites.

Solution

Live Oak Interactive, whom I worked for at the time, had developed it's own MVC framework called Acorn. It was a simple, yet powerful framework that allowed for rapid application development. Luke (the other talented developer on the project, and one of the co-creators of Acorn) and I were able to build a foundation for the site using Acorn that changed it's behavior based on the URL used to access it. All of the sites kept their content separate and afforded the TWC teams separate admin control panels, while all operating in the same server/database environment.

Once the base foundation was in place, Luke and I were able to work through each of the TWC requirements very quickly. We met with the TWC management team on a regular basis to walk through choices that needed to be made, and present our progress.