Web Design & Development Case Study on www.MarieKeating.ie

Background:

This website design and E-Commerce development case study provides information on the background to and implementation of a website created by The DG Group.

The Requirements:

The DG Group was approached by the Marie Keating Foundation (a leading Irish cancer awareness and support charity) to create a new website for their charity. They were facing a number of issues with their current website as follows:

1. The design was dated and needed updating.
2. The website was based on static HTML and could not be easily updated by the client without professional assistance.
3. The website ran on a WordPress engine and as WordPress is an opensource solution the client was keen to work with a more secure and robust system.
4. The client was interested in adding an e-commerce element to their site so they could increase sales of Marie Keating Foundation branded products.
5. They wanted the site to work natively on mobile devices (smartphone and tablet) as well as PCs and Macs.
6. They enjoyed a strong Google PageRank score of 5/10. It was therefore very important that this was not lost.

The Solution:

As a charitable organisation that provides an incredibly valuable service and especially one which has personal importance to many members of the DG Group team, we were delighted to sponsor this website and provide our services pro bono.

The implementation of the new site was as follows:

1. Design
   We identified during our briefing process that although the client wanted to sell products through the site, the most important aspect was the information and support they provided and so the site had to be built as a “brochure site” with an e-commerce & M-Commerce element.
   
   The design therefore is appealing yet simple in terms of layout, navigation and functionality. It places an emphasis on the editorial content of the site with a link through to the online store, which when clicked then delivers a full e-commerce facility.
   
   A critical aspect of the design was the delivery of a dedicated mobile implementation for Smartphones and tablet platforms. This means that both the brochure and e-commerce elements operate fully on both desktop and mobile platforms allowing visitors to see all pages and to view and purchase any products whether they are viewing the site on a PC, Iphone or Ipad.
   
   We also included a simple text size control, which allows visitors to increase the size of the content text as many visitors to the site would be of advanced years.
    
2. Content Management Control
   The site was attached to our “21CMS” content management system. Developed by our sister-company (also called 21CMS), this system provides complete management control of a website (for both desktop and mobile pages) as well as a number of promotional tools, such as a bulk email newsletter system, text messaging system and QR code generation built in.
   
   Its core strength is the simplicity of the system. Completely intuitive, it has been developed to allow anyone to manage their website with little or even no training. Supported by simple help and even instructional videos, the system allows the website owner to be completely self-sufficient and so save money that would otherwise be spent on maintenance costs.
    
3. Secure Code & Hosting
   The Marie Keating Foundation’s previous website (based on a WordPress engine) had been more vulnerable to hacking. This caused a great deal of concern to the Foundation and therefore diverted a great deal of time and resources away from more valuable work in order to fix the issues. This is a common problem, which is happening more often these days. We therefore wanted to mitigate, as much as is humanly possible, the chances of this happening in future.
   
   The 21CMS system highlighted above has been written to be as secure as possible and block the most common hacking techniques used by amateur hackers. Supporting this is 24/7/365 monitoring of the server the site resides on to stop hacking and “flooding” attempts before any damage can be done. This is further supported by full backups of the site every 4 minutes to ensure that if an attack occurs and damage is done, that a complete restore to its previous state can be done quickly and easily.
    
4. E-Commerce & M-Commerce
   As highlighted above, we delivered an integrated online store on the site. This has complete E-Commerce and M-Commerce functionality, allowing visitors to find, preview and buy products on PC, Mobile and Tablet platforms.
   
   The system provides complete control of all products to the Marie Keating Foundation team and allows them to also manage shipping rates, VAT rates, currencies and a host of other elements that E-Commerce systems should have.
    
5. Maintaining PageRank
   As a prominent Irish charity, they had gained a strong PageRank score of 5/10. This can be described as Google’s “Trust Rating” of their site and based on the fact that Google’s own search page has a score of 7/10, their score of 5 was excellent. We therefore needed to maintain this and ensure that it carried through to the new website.
   
   This was achieved by firstly identifying all pages on the old site and creating redirect maps from each old page to the equivalent new page. If there was no equivalent new page then the old page was redirected to the home page of the new site.
   
   The result is that the new site completely maintained its 5/10 PageRank score and therefore its online visibility.

These are just highlights of some of the features of this website. If you would like more detail, feel free to contact us.

The Results:

The design is fresh and engaging, yet simple to navigate.

With only a little training the site admins have been able to create appealing and professional content and setup all their products in their online store.

A visit to the site on a smartphone delivers a fully operational mobile-friendly site that eliminates all the zooming, side-scrolling and mis-clicking associated with viewing a desktop-based site on a smartphone.

Their PageRank score has been maintained and any links to old pages that may exist on other websites will still work thanks to the redirects we set in place.

Finally, the Marie Keating Foundation now have an additional revenue generator in the form of their online store.

Summary:

We are delighted to have been able to be of assistance to the Marie Keating Foundation and with the results in terms of design, implementation and usability achieved in this project and we wish the team every success in the future.

In real terms this is just the first and main stage in the development of the site and plans are already in place for the addition of more functionality, such as interactive blogs and news modules, etc.

If you’re interested in donating, volunteering, organising a fundraising event, becoming a corporate partner or just buying some Marie Keating products visit the site or please feel free to contact us if you have any questions on the content of this page.