Kaleidoscope
After successfully working with Kaleidoscope back in 2006 on their website, a fresh marketing drive pushed the business forward in 2008, and they again approached Gasp with a BIG request.
Rather than having another brochure website, the new website had to 'earn it's keep'. They wanted to replicate their complicated database system that runs the day-to-day business, constantly developed over many years from what started as a simple excel spreadsheet and had grown to be a highly specific and robust Access Database.
Kaleidoscope sent us to view some of their main competitors websites which from the outside looked good and worked well, but a little bit of digging by Glen (who enjoys breaking websites in his spare time) proved all the competitors systems were flawed, breakable and easy to manipulate. So at least we now knew how not to go about developing the website.
A nice Web 2.0 styled website was designed to compliment the new logo Kaleidoscope had created. The colours compliment the tone of the many wood frames Kaleidoscope have on offer and the logo was replicated on the background of the website to look like wallpaper.
Once we had learnt how Kaleidoscope's internal system worked, we rebuilt the relational database in mySQL to make interacting with the data simpler. Customer accounts, large file upload system and 2 different stepped ordering systems were next on the list, followed by the Admin back end to manage and process orders and uploaded files. Once all the elements were completed and tied together a bulk email was fired off to all the users that had signed up to the system during it's development, so that from launch of the new site the website was under heavy use straight away.