June 1, 2006
Cobalt has created a complete online experience for readers of the Washington Spaces magazine (www.washingtonspaces.com), a new luxury living magazine aimed at affluent homeowners in the Washington metropolitan area. The web site went live today to promote and enhance the new magazine as well as provide many new revenue channels for the publisher.
Because Washington Spaces caters to a very sophisticated audience, they needed to create an online presence that was visually compelling and offered many tools and services to extend the magazine experience yet could be maintained internally with limited IT resources. Cobalt provided sophisticated administration tools to manage all aspects of the complex site: design, content, e-commerce, advertising and reporting.
One of the technologies Cobalt employed for this project was a pre-release version of Microsoft Commerce Server 2007. Cobalt was selected to be one of only a handful of companies worldwide to participate in early development on this product and thus was able to deliver a solution to Washington Spaces on this advanced platform well before it was available for purchase. Commerce Server enables Washington Spaces to track site usage and user profiles, serve advertisements and other content based on the viewers interests and ultimately generate meaningful reports for advertisers.
Cobalt also implemented Microsoft Content Management Server, an enterprise-grade web site content management system that allows staff writers to easily publish articles online, MondoSearch (www.mondosoft.com), a full-featured web site search toolset to allow users to find content and vendor information of interest and wrote custom code for integration with MultiPub (www.datasystem.com), their subscriptions fulfillment system to handle online subscription sales and customer profile updates.
Other web site functionality includes searchable vendor and service directories, classified ads, virtual home tours, photo galleries, dynamic interest-based advertising, and newsletters registration.
Greater Washington Publishing Inc., is a subsidiary of The Washington Post. In addition to Washington Spaces, GWPI produces several other leading publications including: Apartment Showcase, Retirement Living, New Homes Guide and Cars.com.
About Cobalt
Cobalt (www.cobalt.net) is an Alexandria-based software development firm focused on work with associations, non-profits, certification boards and mid-sized corporate clients. Founded in 1996, Cobalt has worked with over 100 customers to help drive revenue, increase internal efficiency and offer value-added services through customized, database-driven web sites, software applications, systems integration and web site content management solutions.
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