Case Study Friday: Credit Card Chaser Part 2

Last week, in our inaugural Case Study Friday post, Joel described a new site he’s been developing – CreditCardChaser.com. Today, I’m going to pick up where he left off and provide some insight into the technical aspects of the site and the “Chaser” tool.

As Joel mentioned last week, Credit Card Chaser is built on top of Wordpress and uses a modified WooThemes theme. However, the “Chaser” itself is completely custom.

The front-end is built using the fabulous JQuery UI javascript library. I’ve sang the praises of JQuery before, but this was my first project using the newer UI library. JQuery UI provides simple and powerful methods for implementing all sorts of eye-candy, including drag-and-drop, tabs, accordions, and animations, making it a breeze to implement some really fancy user interfaces.

Joel and I played around with a lot of the different JQuery animation effects on the credit card results page, but in the end opted to simply hide and show cards based on the criteria chosen by the user. We found that trying to animate a large number of cards at the same time when showing or hiding a lot of cards tended to be distracting as well as sometimes bogging down the browser.

The back-end of the Chaser is custom PHP. This code takes care of loading and displaying the correct cards on the initial load of the results page. Joel also needed a way to manage his inventory of credit cards, so I developed an administrative application using CakePHP, which allows Joel to easily add, edit, or delete credit cards from the application, as well as allowing him to assign categories and other attributes to the cards. CakePHP makes it very easy to set up a quick application like this and gives Joel a good way to securely and easily edit the credit cards on the site.

Well, that’s the architecture of CreditCardChaser.com in a nutshell. While I understand that not all of the domainers who read this blog are programmers or technical, I hope some of the stuff I’ve talked about has piqued your interest and given you an idea of some of what’s out there. Next week, we’ll be back with another case study. If you have any suggestions or ideas of what you’d like us to talk about next, let us know in the comments!

Enter your desired keyword(s) to start finding great domain names!

Similar Posts:

• Case Study Friday: CreditCardChaser.com
• Javascript Libraries – Adding polish to your site the easy way
• What We Can Learn About Intuit’s Purchase of Mint.com for $170 Million
• Our Team
• Case Study Friday: Versailles.com