Verbatim
MACROMEDIA SHOWCASE AWARD WINNER
The major redevelopment of the Verbatim site needed to reposition Verbatim into the consumer electronics market and inform users of their new product offerings. The new website design is slick, clean and fresh with a sense of "emerging technology". The site automatically synchronises with the Verbatim master database, saving data re-entry, and is powered by an extensive ColdFusion powered CMS. The Verbatim site attracts a large amount of visitors and has received much praise for its sharp & professional web design, including a Macromedia Showcase award.
Project challenge
Verbatim wanted a stylish looking site that appealed to a younger demographic, moving more away from their traditional image as makers of electronic media. The objective was to establish a database-driven website populated from their existing corporate database, avoiding the extra labour of double-entering data across multiple databases. Secondary objectives were to increase sales across all product categories, rationalise driver downloads, technotes, and brochures, to increase traffic to the site overall, and reposition the Verbatim brand into the consumer electronics space.
A content management system was also needed to manage the product database, driver downloads, support section and other pages within the site. The previous site had flat HTML pages with direct links to drivers and brochures - there was no integrated system tying it all together. Downloads were sometimes duplicated with different names, leading to confusion about which drivers and versions were appropriate for each product and leading to unnecessary hard drive space and bandwidth consumption.
Search engine performance was also a major driver - the existing site was in frames and product pages were indexed poorly, if at all. The site did not rank at all on many product-related terms and overall search engine positioning was poor.
Outcome
Verbatim stored all of its product information, including product descriptions, in an accounting application. The major challenge was to avoid double-entering data by parsing the needed data out of the legacy application into a format that could be used on the website. Verbatim needed the ability to have changes in the master database reflected on the site without maintaining two databases. In addition, site managers would need to add to the description, and to present different categories on the website to those stored in the other database.
Evolution 7 examined the database layout of the master database carefully and wrote a migration module in ColdFusion to parse data from one application to the other. This module acts as a kind of "middleware" layer, querying, massaging, and transforming the data as it passes through. For example, product description data that was stored across several fields in the master database was concatenated into a single field in the web database.
A customised content management system (CMS) was created that would allow Verbatim to add to the product description, images, and metadata beyond that stored in the master database. This was also linked to a product driver database and support module.
Evolution 7 used ColdFusion to implement a daily schedule of collecting and parsing data from a secure Verbatim server, and then publishing it live onto the website with any additional metadata attached through the content management system. Every day the application checks over 3000 products and categories for any modifications and publishes changes live to the site as they occur in the master database.
A comprehensive driver, technote, and brochure management system was created, allowing site managers to attach these assets to products as desired. Each asset is only stored once in the filesystem but can be attached to an unlimited number of products. The system also tracks operating system versions, special instructions, and other properties for drivers, as well as displaying appropriate legal disclaimers on usage which must be agreed to before downloading.
Site managers also wanted the ability to edit and publish certain pages, and after examining several options Contribute was selected as the preferred option, as a lightweight content management that allowed them flexibility and speed of updates while avoiding costly implementations of full-blown content management. The Verbatim site is built through templates created in Dreamweaver MX, which allowed Evolution 7 to "lock down" parts of the template while allowing editable regions in others.
Close attention was paid to optimising search engine exposure and perfomance. With large, dynamic sites, search engine exposure is often a problem as search engines do not handle "dynamic" type URL's very well. Using ColdFusion and dynamically generated product pages allowed Evolution 7 to generate thousands of product and driver download pages from a few templates, whilst avoiding common problems that plague database-driven sites and prevent them from getting indexed properly. Utilising cross-indexing methods and other search optimisation techniques the entire product database now indexes well and ranks highly, often #1, on search engines for product-related searches. Overall, search engine performance and traffic is vastly improved with search engine referrals up over 200%.
Verbatim selected Macromedia products on the basis of the company's leading position in web development technology and software applications. A premium web solution was needed that would not only meet current needs but exceed them and serve as a powerful platform for the website going forwards into the future. The Macromedia platform of integrated products provided clearly the best technology to serve and develop the Verbatim website and the result has been an overwhelming success.