Instantly customizable, highly scalable, white label dating system
The project
WooWise Limited, the owners of Smooch.com (one of the biggest free dating sites in the UK) made the decision to enter the white labelling space. For this they would need an entirely new
application, built from scratch, but running on top of their Smooch.com infrastructure. It would need to be fast enough to handle hundreds of thousands of users, but without
sacrificing functionality. The user interface would be cutting edge, applying Ajax techniques to avoid unnecessary page loads and where possible to give the ease of use of a desktop
application rather than a website, and of course the entire application would need to be simply rebrandable. Additionally each brand should be able to target a particular dating niche,
and the system should auto-customize database access, sign-up forms, the search user interface, etc.… Launching a new brand using the system, including configuring the brand and
targeting options, should take no more than a few minutes.
Solutions
A dating application is a huge program, usually bigger even in its management backend than in the user interface. It requires tools for managing its members, processing photos, editing profile essays, identifying and deterring scammers and spammers of all kinds, mass emailing, and managing the financial accounts, among many other things. This particular system would have additional backend requirements for all the niche targeting options and rebranding features. As well as being large and complicated it would have to be able to withstand huge traffic without ever slowing down, and without requiring unreasonably powerful and expensive hardware. We had been building highly optimised web applications for more than a decade, so we knew we could meet the spec.
This system had one additional interesting problem. It was to be built on top of a large existing application, Smooch.com, which was built and maintained in classic ASP. We had built the original app and been managing it for some years, so we were very familiar with the code. We're one of the few legacy ASP developers remaining in England, and would not have found it especially daunting had we not built the original. The huge existing Smooch database would sit beneath the system: millions of mail messages and chats (over 3 million messages per month), over 1 million users, 200 records per user profile (that's over 200m profile records), etc. And alongside the brand new .NET app, writing to the same DB, would be the old ASP app on which Smooch.com runs.
This actually simplified some things. We couldn't design a newly optimised DB as we would normally have done, we just had to use the existing one. This was not an optimal starting point of course, but it meant that little time was spent thinking about data (this might have consumed 5% of the project time of a system this large). This gave us more time to spend on the User interface, which was consequently to be a massive improvement on the original Smooch interface
Results
The white label system launched just before Christmas 2011 (the busiest period in the online dating year) without a hitch. Initially three test sites were launched including a high profile partnership with FreeAds.co.uk, the 2nd largest free ads site in the UK. Additional modules for the site were planned prior to launch and are underway now. These include a Freemium payment option, co-registration to some of the largest dating sites in the country, and improvements to the white label segmentation.
Example White Labelled Website
www.freedate.co.uk