Australian Consumers' Association (ACA)

Who are ACA?

The Australian Consumers' Association (ACA), publisher of CHOICE magazines, website and books, is a not-for-profit organisation which has been researching and campaigning on behalf of consumers since it were founded in 1959. With over 150,000 subscribers to its information products, ACA is the largest consumer organisation in Australia. ACA's aim is to tackle the issues that really matter to consumers, arming them with the information to make confident choices and lobbying for change when consumers are getting a raw deal.

Overview

OrbSys* has been with involved with the Australian Consumers’ Association (ACA) since 2001 developing various solutions including ASP and ASP.NET web sites, content management systems and content deployment systems.
Working for an organisation like ACA is both a rewarding and demanding experience. Because ACA is a consumer watchdog organisation it is very important that any service they offer to the general public or paying customers is of benefit to them and is easy to use. If there are any user problems with a system then it is quickly brought to ACA’s attention by their users. Because of this unique type of customers ACA service it has been very important for OrbSys* to supply a reliable and professional system to protect the integrity of ACA, this has been achieved successfully by OrbSys*.

How the relationship began

OrbSys* was first engaged in early 2001 by ACA to sort out problems with a legacy ASP content management system, the web publishing system and the website. ACA had a number of issues with their systems but the main problems were in their publishing system, this was causing major problems and stopping ACA from deploying new content to production. The web publishing system was built using custom components and SQL server, OrbSys* came in to streamline the process and redevelop some of the troublesome components, and also to reconfigure some of the other steps to produce a reliable publishing process. Over the time OrbSys* has been redeveloping the publishing system, publish time have dropped from 3-4 hours down to around 12 minutes.

CHOICE Online Shop Redesign 2001

In 2001 ACA reorganized their online shop structure and how they sold their online products, books and magazines, this required a major overhaul on the asp code, the underlying database structure and Microsoft Commerce Server pipelines.

CHOICE Online Redesign 2002

In 2002 ACA redesigned their web site. The site was given a new fresh look and OrbSys* had the task of developing the code for the new website, this was implemented in ASP. Many new templates, smart category summary lists and displays were implemented in this solution.

CHOICEextra Early 2003

In early 2003 ACA commissioned OrbSys* to build a new website, this website was developed for the paid magazine subscribers and linked to the ACA magazine subscription system giving these magazine subscribers free access to the website. This site was the first ASP.NET website implemented at ACA.

CHOICE Online Redesign 2003

At the end of 2003 OrbSys* overhauled the CHOICE Online website and brought it up to date releasing a brand new ASP.NET web site utilizing XML technology. The changes made to the website were a major step forward and led to greater flexibility and functionality which has allowed ACA to easily add new features and functionality to the website as required. This website release required changes to be made to every system in the content lifecycle; the article authoring software, the publishing system and the website. Many .NET components were built during this process and this allows for much faster development of features and will also speed up redesigns in the future.

The site is a very popular website and has over 60,000 paid subscribers (current as at June 2005), during the day the number of users at any one time can reach around 14,000 with 30,000 visitors a day. The record number of users on the site at any one time was recorded at over 127,800 when an article about Linux was published.

Administration tool and website enhancements 2004-2005

OrbSys* is continually making enhancements and adding extra functionality to the CHOICE Online website. The bulk of the work goes in to 3 main areas:

1. The authoring tool: Extra functionality is always being added to the authoring tool to allow ACA authors to add specific content types easily and quickly. This functionality includes items such as multiple question poll components.
2. New page template components: The CHOICE Online website is continually evolving as new website components are required all the time; these include components such as top 10s of most popular articles, scrolling flash article placeholder components or just component redesign to make things ‘clearer’ to the users.
3. Marketing components: Marketing of any website is always important and CHOICE Online is no different. Even though the website is an advert free website, marketing of the items that are on the website is still important to ACA are therefore they are continually implementing new initiatives and special offers. When website components are developed, backend systems also need to be developed quickly to handle the new demands of these components.