Case Study: www.lowcarbon.com

In early 2007 a UK based company specialising in environment sector job advertising came to us looking for a new site using Ruby on Rails. We prototyped the site and then headed into the full development and deployment of lowcarbon.com. Lowcarbon.com advertises jobs, courses and events in the renewable energy, carbon management and climate sectors and also offers an easily searchable directory of companies.

Features

The site has a myriad of powerful features for job seekers including full text search, advanced search, custom RSS feeds, custom email alerts and the ability to save jobs and companies to your profile for easy access in the future. If new jobs are found meeting the job seekers requirements then an email is sent out daily containing these jobs. From this email a user can easily deactivate alerts, unsubscribe, login and of course view jobs of interest.

Advertisers can signup and post jobs themselves. Advertisers can also manage the lifecycle of their adverts by closing, deleting and reactivating. There are plenty of statistics to help advertisers get a picture of how successful their post has been and they can login to keep track of advert views, click thru's to further information on their site, requests for further information etc. Once invoiced advertisers can easily pay for adverts online and administrators can keep track of invoices and payments.

The site administrators have a powerful web interface for managing adverts. They can edit, approve and close the adverts as well as look back at full version history of each advert reinstating older versions if necessary. The site also boasts a simple but effective CMS (Content Management System) where administrators can update the vast majority of site content with simple markup. Images can be easily uploaded through the CMS and automatically resized for use as logos, or used inline within the page content. The project also included the implementation of a bespoke CRM (Customer Relationship Management) system.

Managing a Successful Project

We believe the secret to a successful project is truly open communication channels. With a combination of face to face meetings, telephone calls, IM and Basecamp we were able to stay in touch constantly so we could get the right solutions for the client in the right timeframe. Regular test deployments to show the client our progress meant they kept involved with the development and we didn't get chance to stray far from what they were looking for. This all resulted in a timely delivery and a happy customer.

Steve's the best developer we've ever used, on the case, responsive and very bright. He's fast, but takes the time to get the code right. Steve and Rails are a great combination.

David White - Director, CSML

End User Satisfaction

The most important thing to us and our clients is the end users of the system. We focus on usability and simplicity in order to get people using the site, loving the site and coming back time and time again. The website has gone down well with end users and is gaining popularity quickly. Here is some feedback from an end user that lowcarbon.com recieved about their site.

This is the best website I think I've ever seen - the first one that shows a good array of jobs and links to climate change. I'm a recent graduate from the University of Edinburgh and was alerted to the website via Student Force. It's a fantastic site and one that I've been waiting for about 4 years to see! I can't tell you how happy you've made me feel. Thank you so much for restoring my faith in finding a solution and seeing beyond the uninspiring temp job.

Rebecca Mcintosh - Lowcarbon.com user

Technical Details

The entire site is written in Ruby on Rails and deployed to a UK based Ruby on Rails hosting specialist Brightbox using Capistrano. The hosting stack uses Linux, Apache, Mongrel and Monit. Some of the more advanced technical challenges with the application included timezone handling, architecting the site to easily handle a different view depending on the location of the visitor and saving association information along with version history. The site makes extensive use of AJAX, primarily in the admin area where forms get complicated and automatic updating of form fields helps to simplify and speed up the experience for the user.

Gems used

• Ferret - Powerful free text search
• RedCloth - Textile markup for CMS
• TZInfo - Handles timezones so adverts are closed in the correct time in relation to the timezone they were created in
• RMagick - For resizing images
• UUID - To ensure unique ids where certain 3rd party API's were used
• xml-simple - For generating the RSS feeds

A selection of the plugins used

• Acts as Ferret - Free text search for Rails
• Acts as Textiled - Textile markup for CMS
• Acts as Versioned - To allow adverts and CMS components to have full version history
• Paginating Find - For simple unobtrusive pagination
• Userstamp - To automatically attribute a registered user to the creation and updating of certain database records
• TzTime - Timezone handling

For more details take a closer look at www.lowcarbon.com