Digital Media Specialists

The end client is a global luxury goods marketing organisation operating in nine key territories.

Requirement

To develop a multilingual consumer facing website to update their existing online presence and enhance and improve on the interactivity for users and data capture for the end client.

Key functional elements included:

• Developing a multi-lingual Flash based product gallery and custom functionality within the site’s CMS to administer this
• Creating modules for site administrators to track product popularity and custom reporting modules to display this in a graphical format
• Developing a custom module to allow site content to be customised and delivered via iFrames to third party sites
• Building the site to deliver content and functionality in English, French, Italian, Spanish, German, Japanese, Chinese and Korean

Technical Solution

The foundation for the application was a commercially available .net CMS integrated with a MS SQL 2005 database with JavaScript, Flash elements.

The CMS was used as a foundation for the application with a significant amount of customised .net modules created to meet the end client’s specific requirements.

Project Mechanics

The project ran for nine months from initial planning to launch and involved working closely with both the agency and end client throughout the project. Some key stages of the project included:

• Developing prototypes of the look and feel and key functionality of the site for user testing
• Revising the functional requirements of the site to reflect user testing feedback
• Working with the end-clients local markets and the agency to localise designs as required
• Planning and delivering against a phased launch plan by developing a master version of the site in a single language followed by language variants
• Providing global ongoing support of the site

Conclusion

We worked closely with the agency as their technical partner from the pre-pitch phase of the project. Our expertise in developing and delivering multilingual solutions combined with their experience as a global agency ensured that we were able to deliver the best possible solution to the end client

The final solution was exceedingly well received by the end client’s offices around the globe and showed an immediate improvement in visitor numbers and site stickiness.

Careful planning from the outset of the project and project management which closely involved both the end client and the agency ensured that the 9 month build was delivered on time and according to budget.