Seleconlight.com - We make light

[Jochen Daum]

Hi all,

we've launched this rebuild of a Virtuemart store in January 09:

About the client:

Selecon New Zealand is a leading designer, manufacturer and distributor of both entertainment and architectural lighting systems. In  their own words:

"We love theatre. The only industry where wishing a person good luck is considered bad luck.

From research and development to the factory floor, what drives us is the show. The show is always on. We make light to direct attention, cause an effect, paint a picture and give form to ideas.

Where our light falls experiences are made. For us, backstage has always been centre stage. Here's to the magicians who make theatre happen.

Selecon.
Performance Lighting"

A redevelopment of their Joomla 1.0/ Virtuemart website, we integrated their entertainment and architectural brands into one website, redeveloped all navigation systems and did a general overhaul of the E-Commerce facilities.

All branding, graphic design, HTML production and copywriting was provided by Alt Group (http://www.altgroup.net) and Selecon's marketing team.

Selecon has recently be acquired by Philips.

About the site:

www.seleconlight.com contains over 1000 news stories, case studies and support pages and its E-Commerce facilities contain over 5000 products. We have used a wide range of customised templates, customised and custom components as well as system plugins to allow for complex data editing facilities in the backend that are easy to use at the same time.

Existing extensions used:

Virtuemart

We use Virtuemarts backend facilities for category management, product management, vendor groups and order management. Additionally, we have made the following extensions:
- A synchronisation module that updates customer accounts, prices and stock every 30 minutes from Selecon's Vantage accounting system - System plugins to allow for 8 WYSIWYG editors, dropdowns and extjs based drag'n'drop boxes to operate within the backend product management page. This was required, as products were required to be displayed with 4 strictly structured sub pages. Some of the information on these pages is re-used throughout the site. In these
cases we provided management through Joomla articles and simply provide facilities to link these into products.
- Custom shopping cart pages and mini-cart.
- Custom checkout process. We have shortened the checkout process to one single page to make purchasing simpler and faster. This includes the automatic generation of a random password on the first purchase.
Existing customers and account holders can log in separately and by on account. This includes the management of a specific customer discount and stop credit functionality.
- Custom popup selection of mutliple products with attributes. Some consumables (http://bit.ly/tdMPB) are available in a large variety of sizes, chapes or colours. Nevertheless these may be differently priced and require a specific SKU. Furthermore a customer would likely buy
multiple items at once, so we wanted to make this process as easy and fast as possible. We created a landing page with on-the-fly generated animated gifs (http://bit.ly/18gNJ5). The next step is a popup, which allows quick selection of similar shapes and sizes
(http://bit.ly/RO926)
- Custom backend component to manage product varieties and SKU codes
- Custom backend component to manage product accessories, offered at two stages: Firstly, accessories are offered when adding a product to the cart. These are mainly consumables, spares and customisations for the luminaire. Secondly, items are shown as accessories as part of the 4 product pages.
- Custom build Lighting Calculator: This has a backend interface to enter lighting performance data of different luminaires. Based on this data, a user can calculate lighting output based on a chosen luminaire, lamp and distance to the subject.


New extensions and customisations of existing extensions

Product Navigation

Based on the requirement to showcase entertainment and architectural lighting in a two column listing, we have built custom modules for product category navigation. These allow to link together similar technology in both product groups or as an alternative the layout
switches automatically to a sinlge column layout.

Showcase

We developed a custom system plugin to be able to provide tagging forshowcase items in the backend. At the same time it was required that tags are entered in the same page as the article. Tagging is achieved by entering comma separated words or phrases, where the first tag is always read as a country. Showcase items (http://bit.ly/5XhZW) are grouped into entertainment and architectural application, with a second group of tags categorising the case study into specific applications, such as theathres, galleries or places of worship.
Further tags are used to link to similar case studies and for search results.
An additional system plugin allows Selecon to enter products used, lighting company and lighting designed for the showcase detail pages (http://bit.ly/vQL1z)

Again a special module was develop to allow for both a two column layout showing entertainment and architectural case studies side by side. This module is further used in the Homepage, and product pages where the content is adjusted based on the category or product it is
placed in. If no matching case studies exist for a product, a random set of case studies is chosen.

Transparent country targeting of content and products

We have developed a transparent targeting plugin that is used to restrict and sort content based on the country a website visitor is coming from. This is determined by through a custom built IP to country module. A plugin inserts a selection of countries into every article and product in the backend administration section. Based on selections by website administrator, this plugin allows for news content and case studies to be reorderdered based on teh country the visitor comes from. For example a US visitor would be shown US case studies first and case studies from around the world on subsequent pages.

There are two other sections where this content targeting is applied to products:

Firstly, Selecon offers some technology, which can't be used incountries with a 110V power system, such as the US. (Compare USA: http://bit.ly/PAQYh; New Zealand: http://bit.ly/xzSCy) In this case a number of products are removed from all product listings, case studies, support pages and the search. This is done transparently and applies to all existing and custom built components, without components and modules requiring changes.

Secondly, products from a US based supplier are hidden in all countries except New Zealand, where Selecon sells direct to market.

Product Support

A custom component was developed to provide a wide range of navigation options for product support. Product support pages link to related products, based on category selection in Virtuemart and also pull through information directly from product data.



Feel free to contact us on info@automatem.co.nz with any question on this site.

Kind Regards,

Jochen Daum

Chief Automation Officer
Automatem Ltd

Phone: 09 630 3425
Mobile: 021 567 853
Email: jd@automatem.co.nz
Skype: jochendaum
Website: www.automatem.co.nz

[gmcgilli]

very nice indeed. It's obvious a lot of work went into it. congrats!

[PRO]

what exactly isw com_storefront?

is it just another com_content? with seperate templates?

[Jochen Daum]

Hi,

We've built com_storefront from the ground up as an aggregator component for all store related items in this site. It handles the following things:

- Creates a 1-step checkout process with shipping, billing address, shipping details and payment. This is largely done by calling virtuemart functions, though we used our own inhouse form toolkit to build the address forms. This also includes facilities that handles stop credit and reseller discounts. We synchronise the resellers from their Vantage accounting system every 30 mins.

- Shows the mini cart and the cart. Once we had com_storefront, it was easier to rebuild this than to reuse Virtuemarts

- Shows the 3 column product listing layout: http://www.seleconlight.com/store, which is for regular customers wanting to buy stuff quickly. This is split into 5 category pages and drills 3 levels into the category tree to build the summary. There is also a custom summary store homepage

- Creates animated gifs on teh fly for Gobos: http://www.seleconlight.com/index.php?option=com_virtuemart&page=shop.product_details&flypage=flypage.p1&category_id=132&product_id=10268

- Builds the popup Gobo/Colourgel picker: http://www.seleconlight.com/index.php?option=com_storefront&task=item&category_id=132&product_id=10268&quantity=1 and the facilities to add attributes to the store.

- At the backend, we've built a product attribute selector, mainly to manage the SKUs of Gobos and Gels, but also to handle the SKUs of configurable products:http://www.seleconlight.com/index.php?option=com_storefront&task=item&category_id=129&product_id=10183&quantity=1

- There is a backend process that hides all Rosco supplied accessories from customers outside New Zealand by drilling into 3 of the 5 top level categories.


Kind Regards,

Jochen