BCA's Data-driven Web Design Wins High Praise
June 24, 2003
Tom Patton, President of George Patton Associates, Displays2Go Division, applauds BCA's custom web development and database-driven content editor.
[See the Displays2Go website at: www.displays2go.com]
The web site
infrastructure running the Displays2go e-commerce site is a
custom web content management system developed by Bay Computer
Associates. This web content management system allows us the
flexibility to have multiple persons working on various venues
of the web site at the same time with minimal or no software
experience (i.e. Nicole can optimize pages for search engines,
while Luke is uploading new products, while Sharon is adding
some product dimensions to a text description, while Tom is
copying an existing product category to another branch in the
category tree). The content management interface is so easy
that we have call center employees making changes to product
pricing, shipping weights, and text descriptions at their own
discretion. No longer do they have to come to a webmaster or
MIS person with every change request... they can make the
change themselves.
Bay Computer Associates developed
this database-driven interface without standard or "out of the
box" limitations. We had a twelve-page wish list of custom
features and capabilities for our site. Bay Computer
Associates took on all of these unique requests with diligence
and confidence. Some of these features include:
1) View
all products page (thumbnail images from the database depicted
on a summary page).
2) Sorting of products and the
order in which they are displayed for each category (category
sort).
3) Related products depicted on each product
page, driven from the database.
4) Automatic shipping
calculations prior to checkout, including delineating between
UPS shipments and truck (common carrier) shipments and sending
the product weights to two different databases for shipping
charge calculations- small packages to the UPS web site
database and returned to our web site with the shipping charge
and truck shipments to one of our internal truck rate
databases. Also included were "inside delivery" charges for
truck shipments when a customer did not have a loading
dock.
5) Live inventory, product inventories are
displayed live on product pages, this included Bay Computer
Assciates integration of the web content management system
with our legacy accounting systems, complete with firewall
securities. Backorder message displayed when inventories are
depleted, with expected production lead time or days until
expected completion notification.
6) Distinguishing
"stock" products and "build to order" products; with displayed
messages to user pertaining to lead times for both of these
types of products.
7) Gift certificate & marketing
coupon input, with validation of certificate or coupon numbers
so that users could not double dip and use coupon twice.
Coupon discount automatically calculated into checkout
summaries.
8) Sale pricing with built in discount
calculations displayed on product pages and check-out
summaries.
9) Open account, or customer account billing
& shipping data pre-loads for regular
customers.
10) Meta tag titles, descriptions, alt tags,
keywords maintained from content manager even though they are
only hidden html source codes, enabling search engine
optimizations without touching html codes.
11) State of
the art shopping cart with quantity and product updates,
deletions, sales tax calculations.
12) Image and
graphics management, including easy entry for various sized
product and category images.
There are many more
features, too numerous to mention here... but suffice it to
say that we now own a content management system that is far
more detailed, and more flexible then any "out of the box"
solution. As our business grows and evolves there are always
changes and additions that we are making to our web site and
the underlying databases and applications running the web
site. We feel very comfortable knowing that we have top notch
programmers (Bay Computer Associates) waiting to take on these
requests. We are not restricted with the amount or type of
features that we need to make our web sales grow. Best of all,
we did not pay a whole lot more than most "out of the box"
solutions in the marketplace. The payoffs for us of spending
more on a custom application versus an "out of the box"
solution have paid for the difference many times over (plus we
have day-to-day backup support for ongoing and future
changes).
I can with confidence recommend Bay Computer
Associates to potential customers with good conscience. They
have worked on many projects for our company over the last
five years. They have some of the most sophisticated and
brilliant programmers in house; many times their programmers
have debugged or implemented solutions for us in hours,
whereas my internal programmers had been fiddling around for
days and stuck in limbo with regard to a solution. The owners
and employees behind the company are good old honest
Americans, just trying to make an honest living.... they have
integrity, and are on the "up and up" when quoting and
contracting on projects.
For further reference, email
me at: tpatton@plasticrafters.com or call:
1800-572-2194
Tom Patton, President
George Patton Associates
Displays2go Division