MondoPallone.it
Co. Founder, Webmaster & System Administrator
MondoPallone.it is an online sport magazine founded by me and other two friends that decided to create an online newspaper (initially only about football) that was meant to be different than all the other competitors.
The website grown very quickly and expanded the topics to other sports such as Rugby, Basket, Formula 1, Tennis and many others. Currently our database contains over 22.000 articles.
After only a year, thanks to an intensive work of SEO Optimization, we managed to be included into Google News service and for this reason the number of unique visitors and page views increased rapidly (20.000 views a day with peaks of 600 concurrent users) so we needed to power up our website. We had to switch from a shared hosting to a dedicated linux server which I configured and optimized by myself.
My tasks are not only technical since I have to coordinate, together with the senior staff, all the editors that write for the website; at the moment we have 59 people working on the site, and every day we have to coordinate news and important events to look after as well as resolving any technical issue that the guys may encounter.
The system runs on WordPress as I think it is probably the best open-source platform for building this type of websites. It is great especially for editors as the user interface is very user-friendly and after they have received a short training (usually it lasts one or two weeks) on how to use the system they are completely independent and they are able to post articles on the website by themselves.
Since I usually work with Microsoft technologies (Asp.Net, Windows server) I had to expand my skills and learn by myself PHP, Apache and Linux. The most challenging part for me it was building our own Linux web server, trying to make it as much secure as possible as well as optimizing it for best performances.
Main achievements:
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Expanded a small team made by 4-5 people to currently 59 people
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SEO Optimization which brought us to be included in Google News and put us on the first result pages for many keywords and increased significantly the number of visitor/page views
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Development and customization of specific modules needed for the back/front-end of the site
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Installation, configuration and optimization of our own Linux WebServer based on Debian distro