Interview Questions

Assessment Task  –  Web Design Company Article  (Case Study)

In preparation for employment in the web design industry students are required to select a web design development company and undertake research that will establish the skills and management needed to work for or setting up a company for themselves.

Achieve Internet is a website developer for the Drupal enterprise. They develop websites for international companies and organizations. One of their leading clients is Hunter enterprise which is a market leader in irrigation techniques and machineries. The case study is based around the development of a new website for their client Hunter enterprise which will bring together the complex management system of the enterprise to showcase their 1900 products to the international market in six different languages (Yang, 2014).

For the creation of this case study it was important to visit the achieve enterprise office and personally interview the project contact at the hunter and incorporate their customer quotes into the technical details written by the achieve engineers.

• What was the challenge that was to be met by the Achieve engineers on developing webpage for Hunter Industries?
• How was the problem for the translated sites solved?
• How was the complexity of the product pages solved?
• What preparations were taken before the process began?
• What were the challenges faced by the engineering team and how did they overcame it?
• How was your experience about the Achieve team and what are the future plans?
• What are the qualities of a good designer?

The Hunter industries is a leading manufacturer of the irrigation facilities for homeowners as well as commercial properties like golf courses and sports fields. The present page of the Hunter was developed with static pages and contained a lot of irregularities. The old pages were not even updated as new products were being developed and this directly affected the viewers of the web page due to huge number of outdated information. The biggest competitor of the Hunter enterprise had developed a better website than the ad for the same Hunter contacted the achieve internet to build a website which would be the marketing wheel of their company , showing of all the assets of the company and calling in the customers (Xing, Li and Jing, 2011).

Hunter industries is a B2B company and therefore their prime customers were outside installers and contractors. The website was not built for e-commerce but it gave all the information regarding the products as a retail store gives before purchase, so it was important for achieve to retain that information and it should be even compatible with the old browsers the company’s primary customers use (Su and Tang, 2013).

Hunter evaluated three other CMS’s and more than seven companies before choosing Drupal. Drupal had the reputation of managing large amounts of data and they really needed that as a priority because the data of Hunter was really very large. Now their job was to find web designing company which had a strong knowledge of Drupal and data structure. Achieve came into picture since then as they stood out in that sector. The previous sites being made of static pages the support articles were not updated so that recent products could be introduced. The support department of the Hunter industries were the people who pushed the deal of updating the website with Drupal tech which have enabled them to keep all equipment’s up to date (Starr, 2013).

The Hunter industries being a global company has contractors and customers all over the world including Saudi Arabia, China, France and many other. Their business is transacted in over 24 languages, and the growth of the international segment of the company has become 40% from 5% in the last few years. Therefore the translation of their web pages was a game changing effort on their side to improve the business overseas (Spragins, 1998). Achieve translated the base site which was in the US English language. The translation process should be as easy and automated as possible. A media translation model was developed by the Achieve for this purpose which would enable the Hunter to collect all their related media into a translation set and the automatically show the correct file for that language site without having to load the media file to all the translated nodes. When Hunter creates a translation set and the base media file to the base product node and hence the corrected media files are automatically displayed on the correct sites (Schmidt, Liu and Sridharan, 2009).

The Challenge

The web page was very complex before the implementation by the Achieve team. The related pages were very difficult to be found by the visitor and moving from product to product was a very complex process. Achieve now has implemented each product in the irrigation line has its own page in the website now. The product image gallery and videos are very detailed and catchy, enabling the viewer’s with enough details to solve all the enquiries. Each of the product page also has an extensive information detail about the product which can be accessed by tab in the bottom of the product screen. Installation guides, specification documents and support and troubleshooting documents are also included in the pages. Most of the important products also have charts explaining the benefits and specifications of the relatable products. The movement of the user from product to product has also become very easy with the inclusion of menu system in the left side bar. It has also included more than 1600 PDF CAD files in the extensive support and installation support information, WORD documents and PowerPoint slides are also included, each with a thumbnail and metatag information. The inclusion of all these functions on the websites has helped the irrigation installers and the maintainers solve a lot of the maintenance issues, by providing them with easy access to the information in the field and hence reduces the support costs of the company (Ross, 2002).

Achieve realized that even before the initiation of the project the most critical need for the company is to assemble and locate so that thousands of media files ca be managed, including image files, videos, PDF’s, zip files and numerous other constituting a total of 41 extension files. Achieve created Views media browser module for Hunter which utilizes the power of the Drupal view module and hence provides a customized browsing experience when searching for or selecting media files (Mitchell, 2010).

 Hunter routinely updates their media file so they asked Achieve to implement something which might not erase the old files but just be replaced by the new files. They created a media module update for them which was created from the base of Drupal 7 core (Korman, 2006).

The inclusion of the media files on the Hunter site such as PDF files, JPEG’s, Microsoft word documents, zip files and likewise files were very important to be included in the search results of the website. The present search module Solr search which cannot index the actual file content effectively, such as the content of the document files. Achieve developed ApacheSolr media module has the ability to index the fields within the media fields including titles, descriptions and taxonomies which can effectively search for contents in any file. The custom module elements developed by Achieve allows any user to understand how the resource library, support library and the case study library of Hunter enterprise works. They can look for anything starting from product type customer type or location and surfaces the information really comfortably for them. That was an absolute masterpiece search module developed by the Achieve for the Hunter enterprise. Achieve has also included the website with a multiple number of landing pages which aids in the location of information in a similar set of information. They are for the representation of product and product lines, support documents and resources like marketing PDF’s. The landing pages have extensive filtering capabilities which can extract any piece of information required by the user or localized search is also present which searches type of search results only in the landing page (Fan, 2014).

Why Drupal (Achieve Internet) Was Chosen?

The challenging part was the organization of the information part internally and the process by which the content creators will efficiently manage the information. It was one of the many interesting challenges faced by the Achieve team in the project.

The first obstacle to be overcome was the effective implementation of the complex product pages, the tabs and the embedded charts. Panels, charts, contexts and custom pages were implemented as solutions for the problem, but custom page was found most suitable.

 The placement of the elements of the page was to be done correctly such as image galleries and the blocks on the right side of the page without content wrapping was proving to be a problem. Even the Drupal blocks were not working so the engineers wrote a custom renderer to insert the content in the correct places of the template (Djonov, 2007).

The project page had a Feature tab which showed the content formatted in two bulleted list. He balancing of this column was quite problematic and required a lot of brain storming. This would allow the content creator to insert the contents in a plain text box and it will fit automatically in the correct position of the page.

The display of tabs on the product pages was another challenging task and therefore dummy placeholder with field types was created. This renders the Solr search as a tab on the page.

The process to format the resources on the product detail page’s Resource tab and on the Resource landing page was another interesting task for the Achieve team. Formatting of a page includes the resource thumbnail, image, custom titles, and the flags which displays a dropdown menu when the user hovers over the resource. This was implemented by the help of a Media Translational module and a number of custom theme functions which controls the grouping of related content and the language selection drop down menu (Di Blas, Garzotto and Poggi, 2009).

The grouping of the landing pages and the tabs in the product pages which are a part of the Solr search results was a tough cookie to figure out. Then they came up with a solution of dividing the landing page and tabs in two separate themes.

The basic problem of the website was that it had to function in IE6 as most of the customers of Hunter enterprise use older versions of computers. The contractors who use the website is one of the prime clients of Hunter and though being troublesome the website had to be accommodated in the older versions of the internet explorer (Crisp, Jensen and Moore, 2007).

Most of the critical contents of Hunter is in form of complex charts with interesting formatting. The web designers have pasted the charts throughout the sites, including the bottom of the landing pages and the product page. Instead of creating the chart multiple times it has been attached to product node as node reference. In the landing pages they have attached the charts to the taxonomy term that the landing page filters on (Bostenaru Dan, 2015).

The Advantage Of Translation

The product pages contain a video block which helps to down load local as well as you tube videos of various formats. These were required to be grouped together and then displayed correctly in the video block. The designers designed it in such a way that the first video added by the content creators would be a YouTube video and the rest may be of any type (Blanket web design coverage [Book Review], 2002).

Communication is the most important aspect of designing, whether it is through the design which gives the user best experience or by talking about one’s ideas with other designers. The will to push through problems is also the most important aspect of a designer. A good designer also works on the feedback from the users and works on new designs to further refine them. Collaboration and dependency is the collaboration of a designer helps in the building of a great product. A good designer always sticks to their goals and to keep learning and not to get set in one’s own ways too quickly (Badre, 2002).

The above case study shows the different problems one faces during the development of a web page and what forms of implementations and ideas come up to solve those problems. The general problems to be solved for the creation of the web pages has to be dealt by both the design engineers and the client company. The client company has to clearly depict their goals and requirements of building of the company website i.e. a transparency has to be maintained between the client and the designers. The designers also have to be very patient and yet determined to find a solution to each and every problem faced by the team.

References

Badre, A. (2002). Shaping web usability—interaction design in context. Interactions, 9(3).

Blanket web design coverage [Book Review]. (2002). IT Prof., 4(2), pp.60-60.

Bostenaru Dan, M. (2015). “Hard Copy” Building Model versus Digital Webpage Serving the Representation of Concepts in Architecture Design and in Stenographic Design. RES, 7(3).

Crisp, K., Jensen, M. and Moore, R. (2007). Pros and cons of a group webpage design project in a freshman anatomy and physiology course. AJP: Advances in Physiology Education, 31(4), pp.343-346.

Di Blas, N., Garzotto, F. and Poggi, C. (2009). Web Engineering at the Frontier of the Web 2.0: Design Patterns for Online 3D Shared Spaces. World Wide Web, 12(4), pp.345-379.

Djonov, E. (2007). Website hierarchy and the interaction between content organization, webpage and navigation design: A systemic functional hypermedia discourse analysis perspective. Information Design Journal, 15(2), pp.144-162.

Fan, J. (2014). Research and Design of Webpage Adaptive Matching Platform Based on Mobile Phone.AMM, 687-691, pp.2276-2279.

Korman, K. (2006). Web design 2.0. Networker, 10(1), p.3.

Mitchell, E. (2010). Standards, Efficiency, and the Evolution of Web Design. Journal of Web Librarianship, 4(4), pp.453-455.

Ross, M. (2002). Shortsighted Web design. The Computer Bulletin, 44(6), pp.26-27.

Schmidt, K., Liu, Y. and Sridharan, S. (2009). Webpage aesthetics, performance and usability: Design variables and their effects. Ergonomics, 52(6), pp.631-643.

Spragins, J. (1998). Web site engineering: beyond web page design [Book Reviews]. IEEE Network, 12(6), pp.5-5.

Starr, J. (2013). Design Considerations for Multilingual Web Sites. Information Technology and Libraries, 24(3).

Su, L. and Tang, M. (2013). Interface Design Effects on Webpage: A Theoretical Study and Website Evaluation. IJOEE, 1(4), pp.295-299.

Xing, R., Li, J. and Jing, T. (2011). Design and Implementation for Malicious Links Detection System Based On Security Relevance of Webpage Script Text. International Journal of Computer Network and Information Security, 3(3), pp.41-47.

Yang, S. (2014). Interaction Representation and Application of Flash Animation in Webpage Design.AMM, 596, pp.998-1002.