Client Background
Online Casino Gems is a popular portal for the online entertainment industry. Users can search for reviews, the latest casino games, casino bonuses, slots, blogs, and different kinds of information to keep themselves updated on what’s hot in the gambling scene. The platform is one of the most trusted sources with recommendations of the best casino sites and allows the users to experiment themselves while taking advantage of the bonuses.
Project Overview
The client has been running an aggregation service that aggregates information from popular casinos in multiple countries. The information includes slots, bonuses, games, blogs, and news offered by these casinos. The client wants this website to be a one-stop information provider for all the casino lovers (users or visitors) of that country.
Business Requirements
They had an existing web portal already that was built in WordPress; however, it was facing multiple challenges such as website customization as per the needs, and performance improvement in terms of latency and response time. We helped them shift from WordPress to JavaScript technologies that could overcome all these challenges.
They wanted us to improve visibility for casino-related searches and improve ranking all over the world. Some of the key requirements included:
Redesign User Experience
To redesign the user experience and improve the user interface to make it user friendly.
Country Specific Games Features
As gambling is popular worldwide, the client wanted to customize the features of casino games based on the country they belong to.
Backend Services
Work on sites backend for management of privacy and security. This was to ensure scalability, speed, and robust functioning.
Custom CMS
Develop a custom CMS that enables them to add, modify or delete data so that only the relevant content is available to the users and to manage content like categories, static page data, SEO metadata, website navigation, and news articles.
Easy Search
Get rid of the complicated navigation process and wanted to ease the search and navigation for their users. It included easy search for the latest online casinos, bonuses, gambling tickets etc.
Challenges
Performance Improvements
We needed to optimize the web portal for performance enhancement and scale up the system on a monthly basis and retain the user’s attention.
Data Modeling
Data Modeling is the process of creating data models by which data associations and constraints are described and eventually coded to reuse. Data Modeling thus helps to increase consistency in naming, rules, semantics, and security. The emphasis is on the need for availability and organization of data, independent of the manner of its application.
Server-Side Rendering
Server-side rendering, which is the most common method for displaying information onto the screen, was to be implemented. It works by converting HTML files on the server into usable information for the browser.
Search Engine Optimization
Despite all the efforts made, Casino Gems found itself nowhere in the search engine result pages and helping them attract potential users was a major challenge.
Solution
After thoroughly analyzing the requirements, the following considerations were made that helped the client to overcome all the challenges.
01. Customized Content Management System
We introduced a customized CMS (Content Management System) that was able to satiate all the complex needs of the client. It helped them manage all their content including the static pages, page data, SEO Metabase, articles/blogs, and more.
02. Implementation of Load Balancer
We reviewed the traffic pattern and as the visitors everyday were rising on continuously, we introduced load balancer for higher availability. Frontend interaction is implemented using Next.JS, whereas for backend AWS services lambda and API gateway were used.
03. MongoDB Atlas
We moved the database to Mongo DB. MongoDB helped to keep relational nature of data while seamlessly and securely managing it in the cloud. The multi-cloud database offered the client agility of schema definition, horizontal scaling, and joins capability on the fully managed cloud-based service.
04. Migration to Next JS
Offering an enhanced website speed and improved Search Engine optimization, migration to Next.JS offered out of box tooling and configuration for a faster web portal.
05. Cloud Based Serverless Architecture
AWS cloud-based serverless architecture was introduced that eliminated the need for security patches, capacity management, load balancing, scaling. With AWS API gateway, S3 and Lambda we created RESTful APIs for a quicker response time.
- We introduced S3 for dynamic storage of the assets on the website
- Monitoring of AWS infrastructure was done via CloudWatch
- AWS content delivery network for a lower latency response for the visitors globally.
- AWS users’ management with IAM
Results
By partnering with us for this project our client was able to get the following results.
Enriched User Experience
With an improved UI and navigation on the platform, users enjoyed a rich experience that resulted in more time spent on the website with happy, satisfied, and repeated users.
Prompt Data Update
The introduction of content management system helped client’s team to create, alter or update content, add an online store, create web forms, and so forth with ease.
Reduced Server Maintenance Cost
We were able to reduce the server maintenance cost by using cloud based serverless architecture.
Secure Connectivity
The new casino portal offered secure connectivity to the client servers and the third-party casino service providers associated with the platform.
