Blockbuster.com homepage
Blockbuster.com movie category page
Blockbuster.com movie product page
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| Client: |
Blockbuster, Inc. |
| Duration: |
7 months |
| Systems: |
Vingnette 6 for CDA and
SMA, BEA WebLogic for backend/middleware |
| Team: |
1 project leader, 1 information
architect, 2 designers, 12 developers |
Background
Prior to 1999, Blockbuster outsourced its web presence to a
series of vendors, with very little success. Blockbuster eventually
selected an agency to build and maintain web systems, but the
agency was design oriented versus technology oriented, resulting
in an extremely inefficient system and process for managing
Blockbuster’s web needs.
The systems that were built required a three week turnaround
time for posting new content – even things as simple as
copy edits on the home page. Part of the content process required
that Blockbuster have a team of contract developers who would
receive two lists of content changes (text or html design changes
and changes to database driven data). The developers would then
pull down copies of the pages to be changed directly from the
live website, edit the html source, and send them to the agency’s
developers who would schedule the changes and then compare the
output of the original page with the changed page, in order
to figure out where they needed to change the real code in the
server side application. The html that the Blockbuster developers
edited was not the real "code" that needed to be edited
– it was code that was generated from an application –
so the original application had to be modified based on the
differences between the output code it was generating, and the
output code that was modified by Blockbuster.
Solution
Recognizing the inefficiency of the current system and desiring
a system that would allow flexibility in content updates and
near-real-time promotions, a redesign of the site including
new templates and an efficient content management system was
required.
A series of temporary servers ($3500 Windows 2000/IIS machines)
were set up in a local hosting facility to provide a means to
meet short-term objectives while developing the long term solution.
These machines hosted mostly flat (html) content with Flash
movies created by my creative team. Meanwhile, the technical
team began architecting the content management system that would
eventually control all aspects of Blockbuster's web content,
while a separate Blockbuster IT team developed backend and middleware
applications to interface with Blockbuster's main distribution
center systems in order to allow customers to reserve movies
in their particular local store over the web. The resulting
system for managing article content and movie/game metadata
is detailed in another case study.
Because Blockbuster's IT developers wanted to use Java as a
backend application framework and the technical had already
been designing a prototype content management system using Vignette,
we decided to use the newly released Vignette V6 as our development
and application environment. V6 was selected because it supported
JSP (Java Scripting Pages) as well as TCL, which would allow
easy interface with the WebSphere Java code developed by Blockbuster
IT.
Results
Most of the development of the Blockbuster website came down
to server and application architecture and development. The
data model for movie and games data already existed (from All
Movie Guide/AMG) and other third-party partners such as AOL,
the Mercado search engine, and Akamai had to be architected
to co-exist peacefully and integrate elegantly. New categories
and articles, along with promotional spots were added. For the
first time, Blockbuster Marketing associates were able to make
changes to the website, instantly preview them, and update the
site. The total time to change content went from 3 weeks to
about 4 seconds. |
