- blog n.
- Website on which an individual or group of users produces an ongoing narrative.
05 12/2008
Solution Central now open for business!
Having reached the finals of the 2007 McFarlane Prize, the Solution Central website has undergone a re-birthing. Undergoing more of a re-modelling than a full re-design, Solution Central has been transferred from its static-paged format to Shopify, Propeller’s preferred hosted e-commerce & CMS platform.
Whilst the original, award-winning design has been retained, the site has been re-engineered and further developed to slot into the Shopify templating system and upgraded with a fully stocked online store allowing Solution Central clients to browse and purchase the full range of MYOB bookkeeping and accounting software.
In addition, a News section had been added taking advantage of the newly implemented Shopify blog commenting engine. Further improvements include site search and the introduction of RSS providing site visitors with the opportunity to subscribe to the site’s News feed.
Having moved from a static-paged website which employed Adobe Contribute to provide Solution Central with access to edit the site; the web-based admin interface of Shopify is a huge leap forward giving Solution Central full access to add, remove and edit products and to add articles to their news section anywhere they have access to the internet.
Propeller are delighted to have retained the confidence of Solution Central and to take their website through its third iteration from the original single page we created for them in 2005.
Having designed and coded Solution Central in XHTML Strict and employed pure CSS throughout, we were initially able to move from a single page design to a more informative 10 page site without having to fully re-design or re-code the site.
Again, moving from a static paged system, we were able to retain the design and most of the websites’ page code and move it into the database-driven Shopify CMS, completing a transition which now sees total separation of content, structure and styling.
Once we’d re-structured the page templates to include the blog sections and online store, we were good to go.
Not only has this process enabled smooth transitions without disruption to the websites’ operation, but vastly reduced the cost of moving to a more complex, fully featured e-commerce platform.
