PURCELL MURRAY
DESCRIPTION
Purcell Murray, a high-end kitchen and household appliances distributor and reseller, came to JWay in 1998 to build their first Web site, and the relationship has remained strong. The latest phase of development included an overhaul of the GUI to better reflect the upscale image of their business-to-consumer product offerings.
OBJECTIVES OF THE PROJECT
The objectives of the Purcell Murray redesign project were as follows:
- To enhance the site look and feel to project high production value
- To improve accessibility of information/site content, including dealer locations
- To encourage physical visits to showrooms
- To streamline literature request handling
JWay’ SOLUTION
To meet the project objectives and the timeline, JWay accomplished the following:
- Redesigned GUI based industry benchmarking
- Improved information architecture and site navigation design
- Used Flash multimedia animation to highlight showrooms
- Implemented plug-in detection
- Implemented a dynamic site architecture
- Enhanced database design and integration with third party applications
- Implemented custom database searches
- Employed scalable design for future technology conversion
RESULTS
- An elegant, sophisticated new GUI
- Intuitive, user-friendly site information architecture
- Templatized design for ease of content maintenance
- Custom dealer locator search
- Online literature ordering
- Printable versions of online literature (recipes, promotions, price sheets, etc.)
- Homepage Flash animation design to highlight showroom product lines
- Optimized Flash output format to reduce download time
- Programmed plug-in detection to offer users without Flash an alternative version
- Use of best-practice coding and scripting to ensure successful interaction with all browser versions
TECHNICAL FEATURES
- Flash scripting to direct user to appropriate homepage version (HTML or Flash)
- ColdFusion site architecture
- Access database backend
- Integration of TPS zip code database to route online requests
- SQL search queries
- ColdFusion application server
