Michael Le Du and his development team have become rather successful at getting beautiful women to share pictures of themselves. In fact, they make it look easy. Lest there be some misunderstanding, there's nothing untoward happening here -- just a little website redesign.
Le Du is chief technology officer at New York City-based Maxim magazine, which is published by Alpha Media Group Inc. Here, the good-looking gal next door is good for ROI. He is one of a growing number of IT leaders rethinking their website design strategies as business and customer needs continue to shift to a consumer-friendly, mobile-app-centric world.
In January the popular men's lifestyle magazine relaunched its website with an eye toward an enhanced mobile user experience and back-end agility. Le Du successfully got Maxim off its legacy content management system and onto an open source CMS in partnership with Acquia Inc., a commercial open source software vendor for the Drupal open source Web development platform.
App dev a way to improve user experience
"Hometown Hotties" was part of Maxim's ambitious three-month website redesign. The "hotties" also happen to be a good example of the growing importance of mobile app dev in enhancing the user experience. What's good for the user is good for the business.
Hometown Hotties is a longstanding Maxim feature. Essentially, women submit images and information about themselves from any device. Site users vote for their favorites, and the women with the most votes move on to increasingly competitive rounds until a favorite is chosen and becomes a Hometown Hottie. The winner becomes a spokesperson for Maxim -- which wins too, in that it gains new promotional options... Read more.
