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By Icreon on
Custom Decorators (CDI) is a North American Interior Design consultancy with over 600 employees on staff. The company offers in-home design services for blinds, shades,shutters, carpeting, and flooring from a variety of vendors. Across their network of interior designers, the company services US and Canadian clients for a wide swath of interior design needs.
CDI ran a static marketing site at http://www.decorview.com that was managed by the IT team and seldomly updated. Icreon’s Open Source team worked with their business strategy team to develop a new website that was easier to manage and operated on 4 key principles.
• Future Ready: The old CDI website required constant maintenance and could not be upgraded. A new website needed to be built that could last for 10 years through upgrades and updates as needed
• Business Oriented: The old website did not have a user experience that generated inbound business leads. The new website needed to be managed by the sales and marketing team simply and efficiently so that lead generation was maximized
• Scalability: The old website was built without microsite marketing in mind. The new website needed to be able to ‘generate’ microsites while leveraging existing assets across a central digital repo.
Mobility: CDIs web visitor totals have dramatically shifted to mobile – the new website needed to support mobile devices natively and support device types that were touch
Why Drupal was chosen:
CDI had a tight timeline for project delivery. With a delivery window of 3 months, Icreon chose Drupal as the framework for the CMS. During our initial requirements gathering phase, a majority of the specs were covered by Drupal 7. Combined with the ability to deliver microsites and robust media support, Icreon developed in Drupal as opposed to the alternatives in contention. Website development in Drupal was specifically chosen for the following:
• Scalabile: Drupal is one of the few solutions that can scale from small to large while having the depth and breadth of functionality to support thousands of different use cases.
• Extensible: Drupal employs a modular approach to adding functionality and provides thousands of free, popular modules to choose from.
• Compatibie with Apache Solr: Drupal has a feature-rich and scalable search function via Apache Solr and a facet-driven taxonomy that were key to meeting the search requirements for development.
• Extensive Support: Best in class 3rd Party communities from Drupal forums, blogs, and IRC channels.
• Advanced User Roles and Permissions: Drupal has an advanced user roles and permissions systems that can be modified right out-of-the-box
Multi-Site Capability: Drupal has wide-ranging multi-site features that were an absolute must for the future expansion of CDI site/microsites.
Describe the project (goals, requirements and outcome):
The main goal of the project was to replace an outdated website that could not keep up with CDI’s evolving business strategy. CDI required that the initial phase of the project needed to be complete within 3 months. With this as a pre-requisite, CDI and Icreon developed the web application iteratively and implemented an agile software development process moving forward for further iterations.
Specific Project Considerations:
• Responsive Web Design: With a growing mobile custom base, the Icreon Drupal team developed the websites responsively. Because the CDI site is inherently media heavily, techniques were employed to size-specific image resolutions to make mobile browsing quick and high-performing
• Permissions: With hundreds of designers, as well as an internal marketing & business strategy team, there were multiple role-based considerations to be accounted for. Some designers could publish blog posts, some could not. Other members could edit theme layouts while others could only authorize the changes. The administration GUI was modified to remove specific functionalities per user as well. This was done using a modified version of the field collection module
• Responsive Design: One of the major challenges was implementing responsive design on various platforms without distorting the high resolution of product images.
• Permission Module: The permissions of different users of the system were complex in nature, for example a designer is allowed to write blogs but cannot publish them. Designers needed to be able to see the content type on which he has permissions; therefore we designed a custom permission module using a field collection contributed module.
Major Features of CDI System:
• Product Catalogs: A tool to showcase all the product variations and product styles.
• Product Video Library: A tool for media consumption through a YouTube channel.
• Lookbook: The end user can manage an image gallery of their favorite products and upload from external sources to discuss them with CDI designers.
• Blogs: Blogs to equip the customer with ongoing trends and practices in the design industry.
• Social Networking Integration: The end user can share the content from their image galleries to various social networking sites.
• Social Plug-In: The end user can login into CDI using their social networking accounts.
• Live Chat Integration
• Free Style Match Consultation: A tool to get a consultation from the web site via Phone Call or webform that integrates with Salesforce.
• Salesforce Integration
• Google Calendar API: A tool to schedule designer’s appointment with the customers.
• Newsletter Subscription
• Testimonials
• Localized Content Loading: A tool to display pages are designed for local markets.
• Responsive Website Design
To meet CDI’s business requirement, Icreon chose to employ a full-time dedicated team model. This meant utilizing fulltime business analysis, project management, and software testing resources, in addition to the Drupal development team.
Technical specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Why these modules/theme/distribution were chosen:
These modules are only a sample of the most important components within this project, but provided a solid framework for most of the site's infrastructure and helped to setup a user friendly CMS application. Miscellaneous components such as Drush and Xdebugger were also used in the development of the site.
Organizations involved:
Sectors:
Beauty and Fashion
E-Commerce
