Roberts Radio
Drupal website development, deployment and support.
The Challenge
On this project the client wanted a rich eCommerce website with multilingual support. Modern and engaging designs were designed by Thinking Juice who we would work alongside as the project progressed. In addition to the actual build of the eCommerce website we also had to think about how we would integrate with the client's backend ERP system, System 21.
Speed of delivery was a key requirement with this project and we managed to complete the entire build in less than two months!
Our Solution
As eCommerce was the key functionality offered by this website the decision was taken early on to develop using Drupal 7 as that would allow us to use the Commerce suite of contributed modules to do much of the heavy lifting for us.
Frontend Development
On this project we made extensive use of modern frontend technologies. The style was all nicely written using SASS to keep our style sheets nice and tidy. We worked with the design agency Thinking Juice who drew up the initial designs which we would then use to drive our frontend development.
Once we had all the page elements themed up to match the design it was then necessary to add a bit of jQuery magic to make the user experience much more engaging. This applied from major elements such as the drop down menus right the way through to navigation between elements on the same page using a scroll effect.
In order to give the client maximum control over how their content pages rendered we used a system of 'tiles' which are essentially distinct reusable elements that could be used to build up an entire page. As each of these elements has its own associated style to control how it looks and feels this approach meant that the client could just focus on adding in the content. The website would then take care of how this got rendered to the end user to ensure things are nice and consistent across the whole website.
Once we had all the page elements themed up to match the design it was then necessary to add a bit of jQuery magic to make the user experience much more engaging. This applied from major elements such as the drop down menus right the way through to navigation between elements on the same page using a scroll effect.
In order to give the client maximum control over how their content pages rendered we used a system of 'tiles' which are essentially distinct reusable elements that could be used to build up an entire page. As each of these elements has its own associated style to control how it looks and feels this approach meant that the client could just focus on adding in the content. The website would then take care of how this got rendered to the end user to ensure things are nice and consistent across the whole website.
Drupal Commerce
When it comes to eCommerce in Drupal the usual go to would be the Drupal Commerce project. This will do much of the heavy lifting for us allowing us to focus our efforts on extending functionality and basic configuration where required.
Product Comparison
As an eCommerce website it was really important on this project that we gave maximum control to the end user to allow them to find products that they might want to purchase. A key part of this was to create a product comparison tool which would allow users to select a number of different Roberts products for a side by side comparison.
From the product search page users can filter down their search criteria using a number of different facets and when they're ready they can select a number of different products to compare. When they are ready to compare the products they have selected the user is taken to a a page which renders the selected products side by side for easy comparison.
From the product search page users can filter down their search criteria using a number of different facets and when they're ready they can select a number of different products to compare. When they are ready to compare the products they have selected the user is taken to a a page which renders the selected products side by side for easy comparison.