Roundedcube and Sitefinity Floor Customers with New Website
Summary
Stone Mountain, GCO, and Floor Trader brands came together in one rich, user-friendly website experience. CCA Global Partners, parent company of Stone Mountain's Flooring Outlet, GCO Flooring Outlet, and Floor Trader Carpet & Floors, wanted to have Roundedcube design and develop a new website to be one home on the web for all three brands. This new website was the first step in merging the brands together. The project wasn't just to produce another website, though, but to create a rich customer experience where they could specify their local store, apply for credit, learn all about the various flooring options available to them, and even get flooring design ideas.
Challenge
The user had to have the ability to tailor the site to display contact and other information pertinent to the store closest to them. The website not only had to give them what they needed about their local store but be a rich source of flooring information and provide ideas on how to incorporate the flooring styles into a room design. The website had to bring the customers back to the site again and again and be their go-to place on the web for flooring ideas and information. To allow users to set their local stores each local outlet for Stone Mountain, GCO, and Floor Trader needed to be able to have their own store mini site and manage its content. CCA also needed the ability to manage content on the main site.
What CCA needed was an easy-to-use Content Management System for the new website. But the content management of the mini sites had to be done on CCA's extranet. This information, along with data from MapPoint would have to be integrated into this new CMS-driven website to allow store owners to enter their data and users to find them.
Solution
The CMS that we leveraged for the site was Sitefinity from Telerik, one of the leading vendors of components for the Microsoft .NET platform and author of the r.a.d. controls suite. We are a Telerik service partner. Sitefinity offers an open, extensible environment of visual construction and management with a highly usable interface for non-technical users. It was the perfect solution for the client given its flexibility and ease of use. Sitefinity was also a great solution for our developers given its use of Telerik's r.a.d. controls which could build menus dynamically. Its rich customization options with those menus including colors and fonts allowed our developers to easily translate the visual demands of the designs into the final working product.
We also created a local store administration tool on CCA’s extranet for the store owners to manage their content. MapPoint data also had to be integrated into the store information to allow the users to enter their zip code, find and map their local store and set it. Both were easily integrated into Sitefinity.
The visual design of the website and its content had to be just as pleasing to the user as its functionality. The site’s lively and friendly color scheme was accompanied by an intuitive navigation structure. All of the most important aspects of the site, like the zip code store finder, credit center, flooring information, and design ideas are easily accessible right on the home page.
Attention to the integration of the backend programming into the design was also crucial. Once the user’s local store was set, that location’s name, address, and phone number displays on the home page for convenient reference by the user. This information is also displayed on all subsequent pages in a toolbar that also features the zip code store finder as well as a flooring calculator that allows users to easily get a feel for much flooring they may need for their project.
Results
CCA Global Partners now has a website that has delivered on everything they needed for the Stone Mountain’s Flooring Outlet, GCO Flooring Outlet, and Floor Trader Carpet & Floors companies and more. Users have a one-stop-shop for all the information they need for their flooring solutions. The website offers a rich customer experience that allows them to research the types of flooring options available to them, find inspiration for design ideas, get directions to their local store, and apply for credit.
Roundedcube, partnered with Sitefnity and Telerik, has given CCA the brand identity that they were seeking; bringing those companies together in one user-friendly website will increase brand recognition and sales opportunities with each of the three companies.