Got an Email Template, Landing page, or Banner requirement? Head to Email Uplers.

About Screendollars

Screendollars is a Hollywood movie/ entertainment promoting platform that aims to be a one-stop solution to all movie entertainment needs. It collects, organizes, and publishes information on Hollywood movies, stars, and the film industry, connecting industry professionals with news, data, video, and each other.

The challenges

Screendollars had a vibrant newsletter (with a readership of 200,000/ week), but their website was very basic, brochure-like.

The company approached Mavlers 5 years ago with the objective of creating an effective website that presents Screendollars’ wide range of offerings in not just an engaging but also organized manner. They wanted an offshore team of developers and designers with good communication skills, a team that would work in their time zone, and deliver the results they aimed to achieve.

As far as the website was concerned, they wanted the following information to be presented in such a way that readers have a clear idea about what to find where on the website.

  • Information about the movies, including a comprehensive database of over 10,000 movies released and their box office performances.
  • General information about Actors, Actresses, and Directors, including their biographies, trivia, images, videos, and other interesting facts.
  • Listings of movie theatres, distributors, exhibitors, vendors, and film festivals (in the U.S and Canada)
  • Listings of upcoming movies and their projected box office earnings based on ticket sales and surveys of awareness, interest, and other factors.

Our approach

Before starting to design their website and taking Screendollars’ requirements into account, we built a robust team of experts for them - Frontend developer, Backend developer, Quality analyst, and a Project manager.

This team then got down to understanding Screendollars’ target audience, their goals, and how they are using the platform.

Their user base is divided into two primary categories:

  • Movie enthusiast who loves to watch and be updated about the going ons in Hollywood
  • Industry professionals such as theatre owners, vendor, exhibitors, technicians, and other industry insiders

We created a detailed plan for tailoring the content to cater to each of these two distinctive audience categories by creating separate sections on the web application.

Solutions to the challenges

The team built the website with React Js (on the front end) and a Wordpress admin (on the backend ) with Dreamhost server as the hosting service provider and database.

We used a React framework called Next Js.

Taking the two visitor categories into account, the team created the following sections that are focused towards the movie enthusiasts:

  • News headlines page
  • Movie reviews page
  • Top ten movies article page
  • Genre page

The Screendollars Pro section was created to cater to industry professionals. It provides industry-specific information about upcoming movies, their expected box office performances, their awareness and interest indicator graphs, the number of tickets sold in advance, and various other information designed to allow users to make an informed analysis of contemporary happenings in the movie industry.

To make the communication clear and easy, the Mavlers team used Scrum sheets in excel to maintain the project progress, plan for new development, and monitor/resolve issues.

Beyond website development

While the journey with Screendollars started as a project-based engagement, they have now extended their relationship with Mavlers.

Having achieved confidence in Mavlers’ capabilities, they approached us for help across more channels like email, SEO, and social media. Also, they preferred to go for a dedicated team arrangement with Mavlers. Today, they have hired a full-time, managed Frontend developer, Backend developer, Quality analyst, SEO Analyst, SEM Analyst, and a Project manager.

Here’s how we continue to engage with them beyond website development through our dedicated managed resources model:

SEO

The dedicated SEO expert engages in day-to-day SEO activities of Screendollars to increase the number of clicks on their website (through on page and off page optimization activities and link building).

Social media

Mavlers has established Screendollars’ active presence on social media, including channels on YouTube, TikTok, Instagram, Facebook and Twitter/X to promote content from the website and redirect traffic from these platforms back to their website.

Email

Prior to working with Mavlers, Screendollars relied on home-grown technologies for sending emails that were limiting their ability to scale up to reach their current audience. Mavlers assisted Screendollars in adopting Mailchimp as their ESP to send weekly newsletter and other email communications to their readers.

Result

A well-structured partnership and the dedicated resource engagement has allowed Screendollars to achieve a high level of productivity over the past 5 years.

The Mavlers team has also been involved periodically in offering insights into potential directions on technology, design, branding and overall strategy. This has been another element of the excellent communication within the team and between the two companies.

The dedicated team model allowed Screendollars to expand their business into the digital realm without having to find and hire an internal team with the wide range of skills that their projects required. Thaddeus Bouchard, founder and president of Screendollars says, “Screendollar has had consistency in the team members over years, so that we have not lost the experience and knowledge gained over time.”