Voice America
VoiceAmerica is a popular and successful network of Internet radio programs. ModaVox, the creator of the VoiceAmerica Network, hired CommonPlaces to design and build their website to broadcast their radio programs over the Internet. CommonPlaces built the entire site architecture. When users visited the site, the radio program that was currently running would begin playing automatically. The site was built in a Web Content Management System that allowed ModaVox to update schedules and other content themselves. The site also recorded VoiceAmerica programs in three audio formats, and archived them automatically for future listening. In 2006, this was an example of an early podcast. CommonPlaces was a leader in this technology during its nascent years.
The VoiceAmerica site presented a unique challenge. With many websites, traffic is fairly constant throughout the day. Spikes in traffic may occur, but they are often unpredictable. This was not the case with VoiceAmerica. In this case, we knew that a big spike in traffic could be expected at midday every day, as listeners tuned in during their lunch hour. With this in mind, we built a custom PHP caching system that would handle these high traffic periods gracefully. CommonPlaces actually received quite a bit of recognition for this solution in the Web industry.
CommonPlaces also provided a complete search engine optimization (SEO) package for this project, and VoiceAmerica boasted the number one ranking in Google and Yahoo! for the search term “Internet radio” while CP managed the SEO for the site.
