Reality is that most web development agencies are not aware of the full power of web today, letalone clients themselves
Flexewebs was called in for a special e-commerce project enabling sales of insurance policies for HomeServe.com.
HomeServe.com
Service
Enabling a white-label web site which was to be utilised by HomeServe as a tool for online retailing of insurance policies by major utility service providers.
Duration: 5 weeks
Technologies used: OO PHP (Cake PHP MVC framework), MySQL, XHTML1.0 and CSS2.0.
Requirements
HomeServe.com required a solution which would enable online order processing of insurance policy orders.
HomeServe work with Associate Partners (APs) such as Thames Water, NPower and United Utilities in order to sell their insurance policies through HomeServe.com corporate web site.
Flexewebs were required to develop an easy-to-customise e-commerce solution which was to be skinned up according to APs brand guidelines using CSS and XHTML templates.
The entire project had to conform to strict AA accessibility guidelines and excellent coding standards for long term development purposes.
Challenges
Deliver a high quality solution within a relatively short period of time and adapt to a new framework not used before.
Make sure the system and database can work with the requirements of Associate Partners and be scalable to easily include many different APs and feature their brand on the web site.
Make the web site look appealing without the use of any images other than the corporate logo!
Develop and test an order processing pipeline which is secure and implements all the required validation criteria, while making sure that the solution is as usable as possible for end users.
Solution
A set of highly appealing templates were created using CSS and XHTML for building the entire e-commerce solution.
Order processing works with session variables which preserve order details in case that customers go back a step in the order process.
A simple but highly effective CSS based order progress tracking solution was implemented to aid the order processing and provide highest usability levels.
Cake PHP framework was utilised in its entirety to provide for extremely clean and understandable coding standards as well as a simple overall e-commerce solution.
