Rebuilding an Interactive Portal for Parents and Childcare Providers Without Downtime

Summary

Mom Trusted, an interactive community for parents and childcare providers, needed to re-design its beta Web site, adding more functionality and simplifying the user activity process flow. The Web site’s uptime was crucial for Mom Trusted: the application had to be up and running throughout the whole development and integration process.

By leveraging Altoros’s expertise in Ruby on Rails development and Web design services, Mom Trusted was able to:

• Get new customers and increase its visitor conversion ratio by 75% by virtue of a more intuitive UI flow and new Web 2.0 design
• Improve new visitor behavior: decrease bounce rate by 50% and increase the average number of visited pages 2.25 times
• Apply improved application architecture to provide better maintainability and smooth integration with new services in the future
• Add new functionality and paid services, providing integration with PayPal
• Focus on core business activities—marketing and service delivery—while Altoros managed development, integration, and design

The customer

Mom Trusted is a USA-based interactive community for parents and childcare providers, such as babysitters, pre-schools, and in-home facilities. The project was launched by two parents, Chaz Giles and Angela Conley, who had trouble finding local childcare services for their children and decided to create a resource that would provide relevant information on childcare services.

The need

After the Web site had been online for six months, Mom Trusted identified core things to be improved. In light of constant traffic and bandwidth growth, it was necessary to enable the Web site to scale up. Looking to increase revenue and to make the service more appealing to customers, the company needed to add new functionality and provide integration with a suitable payment system. The company was not satisfied with the current bounce rate and wanted to simplify the existing registration process that was too complicated. Finally, to attract new customers and compliment the new UI, the company wanted to re-brand the appearance of the Web site and apply a new design.

The challenges

• Since Mom Trusted was already a popular community, it had to stay available online throughout the entire development process. Altoros developers had to conduct many of the changes gradually, so that the Web site would retain its functionality.
• The complicated code structure made adding new functionality and integration quite a challenge and required better architecture.
• After becoming comfortable with the developers’ performance, Mom Trusted out possible solutions to the issues that existed prior to its involvement with Altoros.

The solution

From the very beginning, Altoros and Mom Trusted worked in close collaboration to specify the project requirements. Altoros screened, selected, and assigned software developers with expertise in the required area, who worked out of Altoros’s Eastern European development center located in Minsk, Belarus.

First, the Altoros team developed a new architecture scheme, enabling the Web site to efficiently scale up and ease adding new services. Second, the developers implemented new functionality and improved existing user activity flow by simplifying complex interaction processes and contact forms. Third, the team provided integration with PayPal, so that visitors could purchase services and upgrade their accounts online.

The outcome

The Altoros team met the deadlines set by the customer, while keeping the Web site up and running throughout the development period.

The customer experienced significant improvements quite rapidly. During the first month, the simplified flow and more intuitive user interface made the bounce rate decrease by 50% (from 60% to 30%), while the visitor conversion rate increased by 75%. In addition, the average number of visited pages increased 2.25 times, from four to nine pages. Finally, the amount of visitors coming from search engines also increased, since more pages were indexed—thanks to the updated Web site structure.

All this helped Mom Trusted expand its services further and include four new cities and two new states into its social network.