Project - Escape publishing
online magazine sales
Design partner led
The Cauldron approached Matter Solutions to take over the technical side of the web development project they had been commissioned to create for Escape Publishing. Unfortunately their previous web-development team had been let down and they needed a website solution with excellent functionality, very quickly and for a reasonable budget.
We explained the project trade-off triangle, basically three sides: quality, time and cost - but a client can only choose two. We need to be left to determine the third.
Consultancy skills
In order to get moving quickly we knew, from our extensive experience, that beginning to code right away would be a very bad idea. It would certainly make us look very busy and the client would see something on screen quickly, but in the end it would be a big mistake! This is because changes to a plan on paper are at least ten times cheaper and faster than coding and then re-coding.
Coupled with our excellent development team this consulting approach meant that we could listen to the client's complete requirements, and create a working specification in plain English that the client could sign-off within a couple of days - not weeks.
Using this specification we could agree a price and get coding in double-quick time.
Rapid web-development
From that intial meeting, in which the initial specification was determined, to actually going-live with a fully featured online business system, took less than 5 weeks!
This isn't usually the kind of pace that produces the best results. But in this case we really pulled out all the stops and delivered a great solution.
The exceptional speed of our lead coder is even more amazing when you understand the wide range of features included in the site.
System features:
- Customer website: Buy back issues, sign-up for subscriptions.
- Online directory: Browse countries and regions searching for service providers.
- Customers can manage their own banners and directory entries.
- Banner engine: Displays premium and normal banners.
- Directory entry administration: For vetting website's content before making directory entries live.
- Sales administration: Screens for staff to contact advertisters and place items in their shopping basket.
- Superuser and sales manager control over sales admin users.
- Multi-currency e-commerce system.
- Invoices and email to purchasers generated automatically.
Visit Escape Publishing's magazine website: www.escapemagazine.com »
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