A Digital Voting Portal for US Presidential Elections
BlueStateDate and RedStateDate are two political dating websites that connect politically like-minded people, giving them an opportunity to discuss their opinions on politics and politicians, and find compatible matches.
The goal was to integrate a full range of social networking features on the dating websites so as to encourage political opinions and dialog among potential matches.
In addition, the websites would also help members to have the most comprehensive view possible of where each individual stands on the important political issues.
Since the websites were scheduled to be launched around the 2012 U.S. presidential elections, a major user activity was expected. The challenge was to create a resilient website architecture that could handle a large user base and the resulting data.
Both websites needed a real-time chat tool to add value to the social networking capabilities of the websites.
To manage transactions and subscriptions on BlueStateDate and RedStateDate websites, Political Matchmakers required a reliable and secure payment gateway to be integrated with the websites.
Anticipating a heavy traffic load on the websites, load balancing was implemented both at the server side and at the application level. It made the websites' architecture scalable enough to handle heavy user traffic.
Comment Chat, a third-party chat tool, was used instead of developing a new chat tool from scratch. It saved us valuable development time and also gave us access to stable modules compatible with multiple browsers.
Custom code was written for the Recurly client so that Recurly's API services could be used to manage transactions and subscriptions. Some customized clients APIs were also introduced to customize the Recurly payment gateway.
A Facebook page was also created to make the dating websites fully loaded with social networking features.
Both BlueStateDate and RedStateDate websites were a huge success, attracting over 5,200 users within a short span of 3 months during the U.S. presidential elections in 2012.
The dating websites were featured on major media sites like ABC News and social platforms like Facebook, Twitter and Google+, which added to the visibility and popularity of the websites.
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