The Problem For a media company, building a sticky site and an online community is the name of the game. Our client sought to create for its national network of radio stations an environment within existing sites that accepted personal-ad type submissions and allowed public browsing and rating. Digital Structures developed and implemented The Meet Market, a set of interactive Web tools for both the public visitors and the internal administrators designed to cultivate that environment.

Requirements Create a public submission tool from which basic personal bio informaion and a photo can be uploaded and stored. Build a private administrative application that displays, organizes, and filters submissions where admins have complete edit and delete capability. Develop a public browsing area, where visitors can view and rate submissions. Users need to also have the ability to store and retrieve favorite submissions, to send a link to a submission to a friend, and to send messages to submitters. The public pages must seamlessly integrate with the client's existing sites.

The Solution The completed application is built of Active Server Pages (ASP), and utilizes a simple interface that provides access to all components.  And while the public pages have a look and feel that is identical to the existing site, the admin area is custom designed to best meet the requirements.

The submission form writes to a Microsoft Access database, uploads photos to the server, and sends an email to the system administrator when certain conditions are met.  The admin tool simutaneously shows 15 submission thumbnails as links to full bios that can be filtered, edited, or discarded. Visitors browse and rate approved submissions, see average ratings, and can email a link to a friend or contact the submitter directly.  Submitters use a logon and password to retrieve messages, and on grows our client's online community.

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