Online news portal with custom CMS
Create ASP.NET news portal and manage Web Cluster hosting solutions to handle the larger front end traffic volumes

Client Aim:
To design a website that has multimedia features to display the current affairs and information about the hot topics. The site should contain features that would help people to surf through important news and also news related to their interests as well as Ability to handle larger front end traffic volumes.
The solution is supposed to cover a number of requirements:
- Create Custom ASP.NET Content Management System (CMS)
- transferring the data from the old site to the new.
- Mange Web Cluster Dedicated servers hosting to handle the larger front end traffic volumes
- Case States
- Alayam News Portal - KSA
- 10/5/2009
- alwatan.com.sa
CLIENT OVERVIEW
The Saudi Al-Watan newspaper is issued by the Aseer Press and Publishing Corporation. Al-Watan newspaper is the first local daily newspaper based on an integrated scientific study, and the first newspaper in the Arab region for which a previous scientific study was developed, and a comprehensive study by 40 researchers.
CHALLENGE
Our greatest challenge was transfering the data from the old site to the new. Due to the big difference in the CMS version between the old portal and the new one and due to some addons that were installed on the old site, we were unable to use the API in order to transfer the articles. So we opted for a more direct approach and we added directly to the database, after ensuring its integrity.
The second challenge was managing the high traffic for this site, the Realtime of visitors sometimes reaches more than 5 thousand and the total unique visitors was more than 120000 per day .
The third challenge is that this site has always been exposed to hacking attempts and was targeted by many hackers.
SOLUTION
Analyzing our client’s needs and specifications, we designed a custom news portal with enhanced multimedia features and table less css layout for quick loading. The system design is feature rich with custom modules like top stories section, breaking news section, advance search option, photo gallery, video uploading services etc. and offers enhanced usability and functionality to the site visitors. The website designed by us has an easy-to-use admin panel. Majority of site can be managed from the admin section provided in content management system. A person having basic knowledge of Microsoft office can also manage the site very efficiently.
Our professional team has implemented Load balancing solutions to shares traffic between servers, improving server performance and providing redundancy with failover in the event of hardware or application failure.
To Keep databases consistent and available at all times. Our Team implemented also Database Clusters ,this solution offered the accessibility of centralized storage, plus the high availability ensured by failover to redundant hot copies website data in the event of his active database failing.
Regarding to the security our team select Incapsula solution witch offers uncompromising security and performance for Alwatan websites including high-traffic.
RESULTS
EPKSS team successfully launched the website in accordance with the planned milestones.
The editorial team at the Saudi Al-Watan newspaper, was satisfied with its experience in editing and publishing news via a content custom content management system
The Incapsula solution performed flawlessly by detecting and eliminating attacks, and substantially reducing the possibility of bot-related issues which had been a growing concern
TECHNOLOGIES AND TOOLS
ASP.Net, C#, JavaScript, jQuery, Visual Studio, Website hosting using Load lancing solution , Incapsula security solution