Flow Communications

The matric class of 2019 came, saw and conquered their final exams, armed with months of preparation and the determination to succeed. The official national matric results were announced on 7 January 2020 – and Flow Communications played a significant role in disseminating this information.

Since 2017, Maroela Media has partnered with Flow to develop and maintain matriekuitslae.co.za, a website that allows users to get their final results in Afrikaans.

Maroela Media, apart from matriekuitslae.co.za, runs one of the largest Afrikaans community sites in South Africa, on its main platform. This platform is dedicated to the promotion and preservation of Afrikaans culture, and delivers high-quality Afrikaans news and content.

“We started working with Flow when we needed a more scalable platform,” says Maroela Media’s web and technical manager, Kobus Bezuidenhout. “The solution we had in mind was quite complex, but Flow advised us to build on top of a more commonly used and simpler platform, which would better suit our needs, and then optimised the set-up for best performance.”

The results website receives information from the Department of Basic Education and then uploads it to the site’s database for people to easily access their matric results from the moment they are available.

“We developed a matric results platform that can take thousands of users at the same time,” says Flow Communications head of digital Richard Frank. “The flood of traffic can be overwhelming and cause a site to slow down or even crash, but we have done a number of optimisations that ensure the platform can withstand such a high demand for search results.”

Screen Shot matriekuitslae website
Home page of the matriekuitslae website.

Over the years the results website has seen a considerable improvement in the processing and retrieval of data. Instead of creating one flashy page with a plethora of content and images, Flow opted for a simply coded platform that responds quickly to a user’s query. When a user types in their exam number and submits it, the site sends a quick query to a database and then returns with that user’s results in seconds.

Not only are results available on this platform, but users can also get further insights into matric performance stats. “The website can tell you how many people from your school got distinctions and for which subjects. The site can even produce data on results obtained across the country in any of the nine provinces, which can be interesting and useful information to anyone who’s doing research on how our country’s education is doing,” says Richard, commenting on the capability of the site’s statistics engine.

It fills us with pride to be involved in the development of such a reliable and easy-to-use platform that efficiently delivers valuable information to masses of people.

“Flow Communications has been helping us publish matric results in Afrikaans for the past few years,” says Bezuidenhout. “Their service is professional and provides peace of mind when implementing the project specification on a tight schedule. Working with them is a pleasant experience and I would recommend their services if you need good developers and hosting for a challenging project.”

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