Long before the Internet and "user generated content," the Zagat Survey was providing its audience with the best in restaurant critiques from people just like them. Today, though, the field is crowded with user review sites. How does a premium review community like Zagat keep its edge in providing a useful and unique product? In February, 2011, Zagat.com relaunched on Drupal, retiring an aging ASP.NET with a new site packed full of social features. In addition to making it easier than ever to research and find great restaurants, the new Zagat.com is faster than its competition and, thanks to new internal procedures, is more able to respond quickly to bugs and roll out new functionality. Come learn about the ways that Zagat Survey and Treehouse Agency partnered to streamline the develop, test, and deploy process. You'll gain insights into the architecture decisions behind Zagat.com which enables the site to be incredibly fast, and you'll learn how creative data visualization tools enable richer and deeper content interaction.

Questions answered by this session:
What are some of the challenges involved in moving a large .NET site to Drupal?
How can iterative design and development create meaningful tools for end users?
How can automatic and manual processes be used by an existing QA team to catch regressions and provide the ability to work on long-term upgrades while still doing daily releases?
How can you measure competitors' performance and strive to best them?
In a crowded labor market, how can you maximize talent on your project by re-training or hiring for resources with complementary non-Drupal skill-sets?