In July 2009, Stern LLC was approached by Indian-American entrepreneur Pathik Bhatt. Mr. Bhatt wished to build a customized e-commerce website with the following features:
The ability for visitors to the website to email greeting cards to friends and family.
The most attractive and technologically-sophisticated shopping cart available to sell T-Shirts.
The fastest and easiest-to-use checkout system possible.
Sophisticated graphic design request forms for contracting graphic design services.
An easy way for the website administrator to create and edit content.
An innovative portfolio application to display graphic design work in the following categories:
Apparel
Logos
Shows and events
Sophisticated ways for users to view all products for sale.
Integration with social networking sites (Facebook, twitter, MySpace, etc.)
Interestingly, Mr. Bhatt and the Raahi.net team (headquartered in Illinois) desired to contract a U.S.A.-based design firm. This practice defies the current trend toward outsourcing web-based media projects to developing nations.
The Raahi.net team articulated a clear wish to secure a solution whose level of quality rose above the kind they’d come to expect from competing firms they had dealt with in the past.
Initial Contact Summary
Essentially, Stern, LLC was contacted to build a website’s “engine” (functionality, services, etc.) for this project.
The team at Raahi.net had highly-specific ideas for how they would “skin” the site (present it to the viewer), and wished to retain the capability to adjust content and images quickly and flexibly according to their organization’s internal plans, as well as changing market conditions.
Solution
After preliminary consultations, the project was placed under contract. Stern LLC addressed the Raahi.net requests in the following ways:
Electronic Greeting Cards
Stern created an expanded Image Management System (IMS), including a backend interface whereby the Raahi.net website administrator could upload each electronic greeting card to the site, and in the desired size.
The expanded IMS would augment frontend capabilities by automatically generating a portfolio of thumbnails from uploaded images. Each thumbnail would display the image name used by the webmaster.
Stern’s build included functionality whereby a user could compose a custom message of up to 2000 characters to accompany their electronic postcard, along with both the sender’s and recipient’s email address listed for personalization purpose.
The entire system would be secured using RECAPTCHA technology, which prevents spammers from accessing the utility.
The end result: thanks to the system built by Stern, the recipient of a Raahi.net electronic greeting card receives the product in their email inbox, complete with the message composed by the sender.
Stern suggested that the e-greeting card received should link back to RAAHI.net in order to increase marketing impressions and build Raahi.net’s client base.
Shopping Cart
Stern built an e-commerce solution from customized elements, including:
Display Type Software, which allows the website administrator to choose how products are displayed, via one of the following formats:
CSS Lightbox Slideshow
Magic Zoom
Flash Image gallery
EZ Upload of all product images. Using this technology, there’s no need for the website administrator to purchase and train on editing software that will size and optimize images. The Stern software does it for you. Images are instantly resized into thumbnails, as well as into two larger versions, and saved to the web server. Images can be uploaded directly from a digital camera.
Ability for Webmaster to Edit and Change Content
Stern built:
A Dynamic Flash slideshow on the home page. The IMS allows the website administrator to upload images. It also allows the webmaster to select the order of images displayed, the transition effect that occurs between slides, and the automatic changeover interval he prefers.
Text Added to Each Slide. The website administrator can also customize the slideshow with HTML-formatted text which is automatically superimposed over the uploaded image in a variety of formats.
Training and Support
All Stern LLC clients receive free training in written format (via the Stern product manual) as well as ongoing phone consultations and e-mail support for a period of five (5) years from the ‘go live’ date of the website.
Technologies Used
PHP (programming language)
MySQL (database)
JavaScript (programming language)
XML (data feed language)
DHTML (programming language)
CSS (Cascading Style Sheets)
ActionScript3 (Adobe’s programming language for Flash)
Software Used
OsCommerce
Adobe Dreamweaver
Adobe Flash
Adobe Photoshop
Firefox
Internet Explorer
Safari
Opera
Chrome
Time Frame
Raahi.net went live approximately two and half months after the project was contracted. This represents one of the longer implementations that Stern was asked to perform. The overall time frame was affected (as it always is) by such factors as: the time it takes the client to gather requested materials, changing specifications, testing, quality assurance, and last minute client requests.
During the project, representatives from Stern and Raahi.net were often on the phone, engaged in conversation about how to make the site even better than the initial proposal demanded. It was an exciting, intense, and intimate process. We feel the results speak for themselves, as does Mr. Bhatt from Raahi.net. Please see the testimonial below.
Testimonial
The team at Raahi.net thought highly enough of the job performed by Stern LLC to include this testimonial on their site:
“. . . [we now have] a sweet new website thanks to the help of Mr. Darrell Stern, CEO of Stern LLC. We started with one main goal: make our website reflect the quality we demand in our designs, and I think we are finally there! It's so great to see our shirts and graphics displayed in a professional way.
When we started looking for the right designer, it was Darrell's enthusiasm for our project that really pulled us in. Not only that, but he offered us a great deal on the whole package. When we began we learned why Stern's motto is "when you're ready." From our first call to our last few emails (which are still going ha-ha) Darrell has been on top of everything, and often ahead of schedule. We would send him things to do, and before we knew it they were done and he would be asking us for more work. His enthusiasm remained high throughout the project, and he was always willing to go learn and create new ways to do things based on our crazy demands (Exhibit A: Raahi Greetings).
We've wanted to get the greetings going for a long time, and finally Stern made it happen with a totally unique application made just for Raahi. It enables us to provide the South Asian community with one more way to spread our culture, and that's very important to us . . . “
Communication
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