About the Client
Location United States
Industry Home Decor
My Sports Frame is an online facility that offers the customers to choose the photo frame of your favorite sport, and then enclose it with your memorabilia (i.e. photos) you desire, so the people enjoy seeing their most treasured sports memories while displaying their favorite sports memorabilia, all in one stylish setting.
My Sports Frame is a way that meets your desire and passion for enframing the memories of your favorite sport and an associated team in a stylish designed frame.
Services we offered
The Challenge
The client belongs to the United States, and is already running his photo framing business. This project is an innovative idea of enclosing the sports memorabilia in the newly designed funky frames. So, when the client shared the original design of the Golf Frame with friends and local golf courses, people were enthused and they asked for one for themselves. That’s when My Sports Frame decided to create different sports frames for all people and all families to enjoy.
As an initial talk, this seems to be a very easy task, though when we had a detailed discussion with the client we found that it’s really full of challenges and thrills for us. The client was inclined to see it in action and hence we decided to choose a ready-made CMS framework to choose and take a start. We decided to choose WordPress and after having an initial review of the project requirements, we appointed our senior business analyst to talk with the client in detail so later the functionality gets materialized.
At a first glance, the project seems to be a normal ecommerce (B2C) which allows the customers to add the product in the cart, specify attributes and checkout to place the order. Though, while discussing with the client, we found that every product of the client which is generally a photo frame that could occupy variable number photos and are of different dimensions.
Also, the photos or memorabilia has to be uploaded by the customer while placing the order, and the customer has to be allowed to adjust operations on the photo, such as – scaling, cropping, roating, zooming, etc. Once this is done then it should get reflected in the given photo frame (i.e. product) so the customer could have an idea of how its photo frame would actually look when he/she is going to receive the delivery.
These were all challenging parts for the development team, though an expert team we have, had tackled these difficulties very cleverly.
Finding Expert Team
The idea of building a proposed website was not just a need to go live but also to preserve their business identity by offering custom sports frames in a very beautiful way. Hence, the client was quite conscious of finding some experienced and reliable team to execute their project and bring an expected outcome that could suffice their needs and let their customers leave a pleasant experience and feedback for the website.
The client shortlisted several companies including us, though an experienced team we have had finally placed an impression on client’s mind with their confidence and defined strategy presented to client to design and develop the given website. This helped the client to finally make a decision of going with the Perception System to execute their project.
Team Screening
As said earlier, the client shortlisted several companies before making a final decision to go with Perception System. The client decided to have a thorough screening of team members in each company before concluding to a final selection.
The client had a technical and logical interrogation of the team to get an idea of who could best execute their project. Every team (in different companies) tried their best to impress the client though our team proved the expectation of the client with the response based on an earlier experience to develop somewhat similar solutions in the past.
The client was inclined to get a proper screening of the team, hence, Perception System allotted senior team members from different desks – business analysis, coding and database expertise, project coordinating, and service delivering.
Ultimately, the client was really very happy with the screening outcome as our team had placed a deep impression on the client’s mind to finally award the project to the Perception System team. And then a proper planning and streamline work assignments to the allocated team resulted in the proven outcome as expected by the client.
Time limitations
Though, frankly speaking, just after the awarding of the project by the client, had not brought the end of challenges for us, as we had a strict timeline to go live with the proposed website. We had to work hard and consciously so it could meet the deadline of the project. The client wanted to go live within 6 weeks of duration because there were a couple of marketing activities to be carried out just after going live.
This 6 weeks of duration was very crucial for aligning and bringing different stages of websites together and in synergy, such as – designing of UI, development, QC and refining etc. Though, an experienced team at Perception System had a chance of delivering challenges in pace.
On-going Support & Maintenance
The project deal was not meant for just an instantaneous purpose, where we need to design and develop a solution but the client’s ultimate goal was to keep the website seamless in functioning, and continue to serve the client without any unexpected behaviors.
For us too, the need to bond with the client on a long-term support was a primary thing, because exploring relationships instead of just business helps to ultimately bring more goodies in your business as well as life.
Though, offering maintenance support to the proposed website seemed to be an easy task, though in reality it was not. Our team needs to be active to take the explicit back-up very frequently, especially of orders records. This is because the script of taking backup was already deployed which was taking care of orders on a daily basis, but just relying on this may cause unexpected mishaps for us sometimes, hence we decided to download the copy of the latest backup every weekend.
The reason of being bit more conscious over orders record is because the order itself is being a complex entity as it just not includes the customer and product (i.e. photo frame) info, but also the custom steps of client’s interaction, covering layout, zoom scale, etc. of uploaded photos on every frame under product.
Project Scope
The scope of the project was quite clear as we have dealt only with development of the website and hence it includes only analysis, designing, development, testing and then going live. Of course, as said earlier, the project also included a long term maintenance support so this brings different stages for our team to deliver one after another.
We planned out and then allocated the senior team members here, involving a business analyst, senior developers, QA engineer, and DevOps engineer. Initially, initiating from the role of a business analyst, who discussed, analyzed and then brought their business requirements on paper. The outcome of this business analysis process was – a detailed document, accompanying user flow diagrams, sketches, and wireframes.
Website Development
Once the requirements had been cleared and brought on the paper, our development team initiated the discussion with the analyst in order to sync the requirements before starting the development.
The development team also referred to the document as prepared by the business analyst and then took the step forward of starting the development. As a very first step, the design (UI/UX) of the website, our senior designer initiated quick wireframing of the website and delivered to the client to get their feedback upon.
Alongside, the designer also supplied a designer input file to the client to grab the client’s color and layout preference for the proposed website. Based on the client’s feedback, the designer team finally designed the website homepage as well as several pivoting page designs.
While the design phase was running, the development team created the database design of the website. Hence, once the design is finalized, the web development team initiates development directly. Starting from design integration (HTML, without functionalities), our team gradually moved to functional development, picking common and easy parts with least priority (i.e. login, registration, product browsing etc.) whereas focusing more on photo framing customization part first.
Performing QA/QC
As usual, the website was having thorough testing requirements, especially the custom photo-frame interaction. As a standard practice, our development team member keeps doing a unit testing while implementing an every node of the module though, after having an implementation of entire module and summing up together when the website gets completed, we are also doing a system integration testing to check not just the functionalities but also the logica flows of the entire website. Here, the point which was demanding more consciousness was a custom photo framing selection, because small change in functionality may cause a considerable development change.
After we handed the website to the testing team, they had an end to end QA/Testing of the entire system with the test cases that we developed using all the standard QA methodologies & tools.
Deploying & Delivering the Final System to Client
Once the testing phase was successfully over and we had a clear signal of going live, our DevOps crew suggested the client use AWS service which the client approved spontaneously, hence we offered to client a pre-configured Amazon AWS hosting environment where we did an initial level of business configurations and started deploying it via GIT pushing.
As a general routine, we also employed a back-up server and staging environment to accommodate any requested updates on the staging environment before confirming it to go live.
Providing Support & Maintenance
As stated earlier, the scope of the work also included long-term maintenance support for the website. The client was curious about introducing a series of updates after the initial launch of the website, hence it was the right time for us to grab the maintenance opportunities.
Perhaps, the client was also inclined to get seamless support from the trustworthy source, hence the client continued to be with the Perception System even after a development and going live. Hence, the client was ready to sign an SLA agreement to preserve streamline maintenance support for their project. This included routine health check, database backup, fixing bugs and deprecating issues, futuristic enhancements, design and cosmetic changes etc.
Solution
A well-planned design and a streamline execution in synergy always returns a 100% fulfillments of your expectation. Same happened with the proposed project as our dedicated team members kept aligned, especially the design and development team to achieve the most complex task of the customization of the photo–framing before placing the order. This one resulted in an effective solution as the client needed.
A solution that came up finally, courage the client and their staff members to easily and quickly move on to a new system.
A solution (website) is a really happy moment for the sports enthus who were really in search of the sports-based custom photo framing for their living rooms and bed rooms. Their search ended here as they had an opportunity to select the photo frame of their choice from the vast number of collections and then customize to upload the photo of their memorabilia to fit in the ordered photo frame(s).
Technologies
We Used
Results
Milestones & Deliverables
An innovative design of the website, and a fully functional website as per client’s expectation.
Achievements
A desired outcome, as the website is offering a base for the sports enthus and the passionate to order the sports frames and enclose them with the memorabilia and photos they have.
Satisfaction
A 100% satisfaction feeling for the client as the portal has smoothen their order collecting process.
Value Delivered
“Working with Perception Systems was a professional bliss, great work under budget and reasonable execution timeframes, my current go-to for python-web development solutions!”
Luis R. Soenksen,
Massachusetts Institute of Technology
Striking Features
Customer registrations
Intuitive Photo Framing and Adjustments
Inter-department communication and flow transfer
Easy Navigation, Add to Cart and Order Placing
Social Sharing
Order Tracking
Friendly Product Return and Refund Policy
Blogging