It all started with weddingchicks.com. While working on their site, there was a noticeable sluggishness in page load times. We audited the site for speed and found that the banner management plugin the site was using was accounting for 75% of the database usage.
All things considered, the sheer volume of ads along with their escalating traffic brought to light a huge bottleneck, AdRotate.
We considered submitting patches to the plugin and researched alternative plugins with similar functionality. With growing complexities in AdRotate’s interface and workflow, imprecise statistics and lack of better options, we set out to build our own custom, easy-to-use banner management solution. We wanted a plugin that was fast, lightweight and leveraged functionality that WordPress has to offer.
Amy and Jocey were excited with the solution we came up with. There was a marked improvement in site performance, but what they were extra keen on was the ease of use. They said, “You should sell this!” We liked that idea. So we tinkered some, tested with colleagues and tinkered some more until we had a plugin that could be useful to an even broader audience. What we’ve come up with is well beyond what Amy or Jocey ever imagined — an advertising framework that will allow us to continue to address more advertising needs through functionality specific add-ons.
If you have specific advertising needs, we’d love to hear them.