National Geographic Photo of the Day 
Company. . . . . . . . . .National Geographic
Industry. . . . . . . . . . . .Magazine
Solution. . . . . . . . . . . .Web Application

Background
National Geographic is one of QuaTeams' most recognized clients and receives hundreds of thousands of hits per day. QuaTeams has been involved with many projects related to their dot-com site but one of the most widely visible projects has been "Photo of the Day", which is one of the most popular attractions for people who visit the site. It is linked to their top-level page, and it is frequently featured in their magazine. As the name suggests, a featured photo from National Geographics vast photo library is presented on a daily basis.

The Customer's Needs
National Geographic houses a tremendous amount of static content and has the rights to some of the most impressive collections of photographs in the world. They wanted to create a highly visible web feature to make use of their impressive photograph archive, drive traffic, and generate advertising revenues. The solution would need to rely on existing core technologies in order to create a feature that was easily managed by their existing staff.

The QuaTeams Solution
National Geographics core technology dictated the use of an existing Oracle database and Perl for all web software. With these considerations we designed a solution that could be administered by their content group, who were tasked with managing content and scheduling photos for a particular day. Through our administrative interface photos, descriptions and other items could be created, edited and scheduled by the content group.

Visitors to the site see the scheduled high- resolution photo from National Geographics vast collection, a caption, and a brief description for the photo, the photographer, and a list of related websites. The visitor may also request to see the photo enlarged, download it as Windows wallpaper, display it on a printer friendly page, or e-mail it to a friend.

Behind the scenes, "Photo Of the Day" works with a complex Oracle database. In order to speed access times, QuaTeams implemented a caching system so that the main photo page would only contact the database once per day. The cache automatically updates if any HTML template changes occur. In the rare case that an item is not scheduled by the content group, warning emails are sent to the content group, and, as a last resort, a default photo is available.