Client Need:
Jumping from one digital era to another is always a difficult undertaking for companies big as our client. Trying to radically improve a major part of the business requires a lot of components to be aligned for the process to be as seamless as possible. Our client wanted to completely reimagine the digital presentation of their business - they wanted a website that would be sleek, modern, and easy to use, but to keep the original spirit of the company so that their customers would retain a feeling of familiarity. Behind this presentation, they also wanted a CMS so that they could routinely provide updates without the need for additional development work.

Research:
Initial discussions were centered around the client’s current application and high-level overviews of functionality that they wanted to implement and/or update in the following iteration. They also wanted us to provide our own input on possible solutions to some of their problems from a technical standpoint, which led us to begin researching competition globally, but primarily focusing on those based in the Balkan region, and how they solved some of the issues our client was facing. We communicated our findings to them & our UI/UX team, and after a few iterations landed on a set of requirements for our application with a design to match, to ensure we would deliver a product that was satisfactory both functionally & visually.

Development:
Once we had an initial version of the presentation and application requirements, we could begin development. The presentation was to display banners, news, promotional videos, several types of sales, digital catalogs & leaflets of thousands of products, a system for job offers and job applications, and a map containing all of their locations, all organized with additional filter/search functionality for ease of navigation for the website visitors. Since the majority of the presentation is dynamic, its content would be to be managed by a custom CMS as mentioned previously. However, since the client already had existing systems in place for features like product & sales management, our CMS would also need to integrate with their technologies and communicate with their database via API. For our tech stack, we used ASP.NET to run a server on our backend, React with NextJS on the frontend - both for the web presentation and CMS dashboard, and PostgreSQL as our database. NextJS’s server-side rendering features were used to great extent on the presentation for significant performance gains.

Communication:
Defining the scope of the application and the visual design both went through numerous iterations across a few weeks which required some back and forth. Integration with their systems, especially with requirements that were changed several times, also needed constant communication. Finally, during and after the initial deployment our client needed updates and technical support to ensure that everything would run properly in tandem with their previous systems. All of this meant that communication with our client was nearly daily for the full 3-month span of the development of this project.

Deployment & Support:
Our client requested that the app be deployed to their Windows server. We worked together with their system administrators to ensure the deployment ran smoothly, without disrupting their existing systems. The application currently has tens of thousands of visits per day, tens of functionalities in the CMS that are being used regularly, and we can proudly say everything has been functioning without issue. A few times our client requested updates which we quickly fulfilled, without any downtime in the application.