GradFinale makes and sells graduate yearbooks for the UK education sector. I‑Finity was selected as their development partner to redesign their Ecommerce website. The redesign needed to be fully responsive and the website required current security best practise implementation. The solution needed to enable both individual students and educational establishments to register online to either purchase yearbooks independently or to order books funded by the establishments themselves. Each school and university had its own onboarding process for students, this needed to be part of the solution whilst still providing an overall consistent and intuitive user journey.
Website Redesign with Integrated Ecommerce
The front end of the website needed to deliver on the following priorities:
- Fully mobile responsive website with design and functionality working seamlessly together
- Integrate seamlessly into existing CRM and backend systems for business continuity
- Increase organic traffic with a website optimised for SEO
- Customised sign-up process to meet the specific requirements of each establishment
- Smooth, simple, and effective sign-up process
- Purchasing of books needed to be easy and intuitive
- Refreshed look and feel to appeal to both student and academic audiences
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Technical Requirements that came with Integrating Ecommerce into Existing Systems
The project involved overcoming technical challenges that arose from integrating with different systems and overcoming limitations with older versions. The integration part of the scope needed to support the existing technology investments GradFinale had made.
Integration Scope:
- The new Ecommerce website to be integrated into existing backend systems to minimise disruption to the business
- System integrations involved a substantial database, the new Ecommerce platform, and a bespoke book generating system
The final solution needed to provide further value for both existing and new technology by working seamlessly together to drive operational efficiencies.
Agile Delivery of the GradFinale Website
The integration was the most complex part of the delivery and I‑Finity used its technical problem-solving skills to ensure there was no impact on final delivery. I-Finity’s first step was to perform a technical review of all existing systems to understand the complexities, dependencies and any potential restrictions that may require additional development focus. Once issues were understood, broken down into individual items, this enabled I‑Finity to design a solution that translated into code and perform testing to confirm the resolution delivered on the requirements.
I‑Finity worked closely with GradFinale’s management team and took an iterative approach to design and development to ensure customer satisfaction with every aspect of the delivery.
Key Functionality Delivered
- Simple registration and sign-up process
- Easy to use search feature for students and university contacts to find yearbooks
- Intuitive, step by step process to purchase yearbooks
- Fully mobile responsive with specific mobile functionality. The photo uploading tools were re-architected to prioritise mobile upload for profile pictures. This was a specific need of the target audience with their use of selfies.
- Uploading tool also provided mobile friendly previews and touch-friendly cropping and photo editing capabilities.
- Google Analytics implementation with custom parameters to provide granular tracking. Providing GradFinale custom views that can be easily filtered to obtain individual and institution data
"GradFinale has been a very happy customer of I‑Finity for many years now. The team respond professionally and promptly to our diverse business needs including our development, support and integration requirements. As well as the technical expertise, they are also excellent at communicating and have a commercial mindset when arriving at solutions. I would not hesitate to recommend I‑Finity to others looking for a technology partner."
Results
GradFinale website achieves a significant amount of traffic from mobiles and tablets, this traffic has increased due to the investment made to deliver a mobile friendly Ecommerce website. Delivering fully against GradFinale’s specification and meeting their core objectives has led to a successful solution that delivers on their business goals.
We continue to partner with GradFinale as their development partner supporting technical projects including:
- Delivering ongoing security updates to keep solution fully compliant
- Expertise with Azure software
- Upgrading the payments integration to deliver modern payment methods
- Providing ongoing high-level planning for the overall technical roadmap including the path to adopting cloud technology
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