Client
Pageant Planet
Industry
Media, Publishing & Entertainment
Features
Platform upgradation/migration
Event-based Voting
Electronic Clearing House
Powerful eCommerce
Crowdfunding
Laravel
PHP
MySQL
Pageant Planet is the world’s leading resource for anyone interested in participating in pageants. With nearly a half-million daily visitors, Pageant Planet provides guidance to contestants and helps connect everyone involved in the pageant industry, from coaches to sponsors to emcees and other service providers.
What’s remarkable about Pageant Planet is that it began as a simple blog. Founder Steven Roddy, an aspiring motivational speaker and former football team owner, decided to chronicle the story of his then girlfriend as she made her way to the Miss America stage.
By joining her on this journey, he learned about coaching and funding, and he came to realize that the industry needed a platform where contestants, coaches, and sponsors could find each other. This idea eventually gave birth to today’s Pageant Planet, but the road ahead was long. Steven would end up working with a number of tech partners along the way, in an effort to create an interactive platform that served the entire pageant industry.
The new platform gradually grew in size and popularity, and Pageant Planet was eventually given the opportunity to manage the People’s Choice Award for a prestigious pageant. In other words, audience members would log into the Pageant Planet website to cast their votes—an enormous opportunity for Steven and his team.
The problem? Less than eight weeks out, it seemed as though the People’s Choice Award would not be ready for the upcoming competition. That’s when Steven turned to Net Solutions.
Anything short of success would be a tremendous embarrassment for Steven, so he poured all his energy into finding a tech partner who could fix the issues… in record speed! This was absolutely vital, since managing the People’s Choice Award would thrust them into the limelight, before the entire pageant industry. Luckily, Steven found Net Solutions.
The team at Net Solutions scoured the code, highlighting all the major issues and identifying the necessary steps to get Pageant Planet out of the weeds. Based on his initial experience and research, Steven took a leap of faith and commissioned Net Solutions for the job. The team got to work immediately, prioritizing the most essential changes and delivering a fully-functional solution in just 40 days.
The People’s Choice Award went off without a hitch, solidifying Pageant Planet's position as a leading resource in the industry.
My last four vendors would deploy features without telling me and without adequate testing, which would cause the site to break. Net Solutions delivers functionalities that work within our existing structure.
Once Steven saw what Net Solutions could do in just 40 days, he turned to them to address a long list of bugs and to add features that would improve the platform’s functionality. The four tech teams he had previously hired left behind a system full of bugs, and each repair would produce a different problem. He needed someone who would be able to understand how all the components worked together, and based on their performance, he once again put his trust in Net Solutions. Partnering with an Agile Net Solutions team, Steven began work on the following improvements.
As Pageant Planet’s influence in the industry grew, so did their partnership with Net Solutions. Steven continued to discover opportunities to better serve his target audience, and he relied on Net Solutions to make his vision a reality. Some of these game-changing features included the following.
As the site grew, the legacy code began to negatively impact the pace of growth and the ability to implement new features. Based on Net Solutions’ recommendations, Steven decided to upgrade the tech stack from the original Laravel 5/PHP 5 to Laravel 7/PHP 7. The upgrade improved site performance and made additional functionalities available to the Pageant Planet team.
With the new tech stack in place, Net Solutions began the biggest overhaul of the site to date—a complete restructuring of the platform.
One major issue that the restructuring solved was something the team dubbed the “multiple profile” issue. Due to the way the system was originally built, users who played multiple roles ended up with separate profiles for each service they offered. For example, a coach who also served as an emcee would need two different profiles.
The solution? The team used a feature called “stacked profiles,” where a single profile could be expanded so users could list and describe multiple areas of expertise.
Next, the Net Solutions team interviewed users to identify other areas of improvement. Voice of the Customer (VOC) feedback offered an array of insights, from the fact that users thought the site looked dated to suggestions for workflow improvements. This helped the team identify and prioritize areas for improvement, helping Pageant Planet become the number one resource in the pageant industry.
Net Solutions has alleviated my development concerns. I can now focus fully on building my business, which is invaluable to me.
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