Expanding Diver Community Globally Through Divers Online Community
Business Situation
At present, a radical evolution in the businesses’ marketing strategies is occurring, especially in their communication schemes. The rise of social media influence has dramatically altered the way people get informed, communicate with each other and take decisions. Social media lets people interact with each other, eliminating the physical and geographical boundaries. It enables people to share their opinions, beliefs, passions, etc. Through it, companies reach a greater market and become more visible about their services and products. All businesses, big or small sized, are getting online and using social media to adapt their business models in order to stay ahead of the competition in their markets.
Our client, Scuba Channels is an online community serving divers throughout the world who are interested in sharing underwater photography and video, marine conservation concerns, dive reviews, thoughts and ideas.
Scuba Channels is an online community that provides scuba divers, from around the world, all the possible information required for this sport/hobby and gets these users to connect and share their experiences with each other. However, Scuba Channels’ existing website had numerous problems. So, our client approached us with the idea of re-inventing the Scuba Channels website. They wanted us to change all static pages to dynamic web applications, so that it can handle more interactive features, more data and more complex data relationship. Scuba Channels asked LTS to create a top-notch online experience with an intuitive and vigorous website that was much more user-friendly.
Technology
• Liferay 6.1.1
• JavaScript
• HTML5
• CSS3
• JAVA
Solution
LTS’s expert team of developers catered to the client’s specific requirements and developed a vibrant new social community site using Liferay platform. They worked with Scuba Channels to further identify their vision for the website and the wants of their members. Scuba Channels wanted features that would address scuba divers’ requirements by providing a dynamic social platform with user-friendly features that allow them to share their diving experiences, photos, videos and anecdotes on the fly with the entire community or privately amongst friends. The site is rich, dynamic and easy to use, and delivers all the features and tools required to get their scuba diving community connected. The solution on Liferay created by LTS for Scuba Channels was a smooth transition from an annoying and static website to a new platform. After attaining their specific needs, LTS leveraged many of the tools offered by Liferay. Immediately after deployment onto Liferay, LTS and Scuba Channels began making iterative changes to improve the visual look of the site. Scuba Channels is very impressed with the efficiency, functionality and ease-of-use of the new website.
Features
LTS developed robust features keeping scalability in mind that allows users to collaborate and share with each other in numerous ways. New website is built on Liferay, however to keep the design aligned with Scuba Channels’ ideas, all features and functionalities were styled and customized.
Following features were developed:
• Forum (message-board)
• My Page – diver’s activity, personal profile, friends, private messaging, photo album and favorites functionality)
• Email notification functionality for chosen updates
• Scuba divers’ video gallery and photo album management (with privacy controls ‘like’ and ‘commenting’ functionality)
• Dive Reviews
• Blogs
• Articles
• Adopting an Endangered species
• Facebook share on blogs, articles and dive reviews
• Twitter share on blogs
• Scuba Channels’ Facebook and Twitter posts visibility on Home Page
These rich features allow scuba divers to sign up as members; share their media with community groups and friends; and log in their dive locations. Everything together forms the Scuba Channels, a deep and robust interactive community of scuba divers and instructors.
Benefits
• Easy content and image input features
• Well-tested platform that allowed them reliability and ease-of-use
• Intuitive user interface, which improved the visual appeal of the Scuba Channels site
• The new site allows users to upload extensive clips of their underwater dives and images in bulk, to give viewers a more in-depth look at what to expect on the scuba trips.
• New blog feature allows users to stay updated on famous bloggers’ blogs.
• LTS quickly delivered the results and Scuba Channels is enjoying the exponential growth in the online community.