AJ Dyrbye

Wild TV

The Wild TV website is the flagship site for the company. When I joined the company, the site was well established as a combination of television network information site and video on demand service provider. In 2016, the site had 178,026 unique visitors and 949,501 pageviews across 266,383 sessions.

This site was set up to draw most of its content automatically from the company’s internal video processing and management system. Most content is generated from that system to populate the pages. With that in mind, the Wild TV site required very little maintenance. My most common maintenance activity was switching out and reporting on banner ad campaigns, followed by basic edits to articles.

That said, the site includes a number of custom Joomla components to govern various aspects ranging from serving up VOD to managing customer accounts to displaying broadcast schedules. As the previous developer left no documentation, it was regularly up to me to delve into the site files, determine which component was tied to which function, and trace back which part of the code was responsible when the site showed erratic behaviour. At this point, I would document the relationships, identify the lines of code for closer attention, and turn over the site to the software development branch for further work.

For a time, I championed the Latest News area of the site, but was unable to maintain regular updates due to a lack of support on the content front from other areas of the business.

I was also directly involved in the process of reworking the site to separate the network and video on demand aspects. As part of this process, I created a version of the Wild TV site on my local machine with all VOD elements removed, and had a direct hand in developing the first and second drafts of the independent VOD service. This is still in development as of March 2016.

This was the site I spent the most time on in terms of Google Analytics. Most notably, I was able to leverage pageview, session duration and bounce rate reporting to determine which shows were being watched via the VOD side of the site, and which ones users were most likely to watch entire episodes of via the web interface. This helped fill in a reporting gap, as the VOD streaming itself was not being tracked.