SharePoint-Based Public Website to Showcase and Sell Hi-Tech Marine Equipment

Customer

The Customer is a US-based Internet marketing agency specializing in SEO, CRO, web development and design.

The end Customer is a US-headquartered group of companies that design and develop a wide range of hi-tech products for oceanographic research, marine transportation, offshore energy, water resources, defense and others.

Challenge

The end Customer needed to develop the main website to bring together and showcase all the product lines, equipment and services provided by 20+ companies of the group, in order to give their clients the opportunity to quickly get comprehensive information on product items and contact the sales team for a consultation.

The Customer provided the website design to implement. It was requested to develop a powerful content management system and fill the website with well-structured, detailed descriptions of all products and services. The website was required to be available both on PCs and mobile devices. The Customer expected the task to be completed in a limited timeframe of only 3 weeks.

Solution

Among possible content management systems for the future website, the Customer chose SharePoint as the platform providing strong content management features and powerful search capabilities.

ScienceSoft’s team with 9-year experience in SharePoint development and customization was commissioned to fulfil the task of deploying SharePoint as a content management system, implementing the website design and making it responsive.

Due to strict time constraints, ScienceSoft’s team went for SharePoint’s out-of-the-box content management features. After their implementation, the team focused on custom development and created:

• Custom Windows PowerShell scripts that allowed to import the entire set of product and service descriptions from multiple MS Excel files to SharePoint lists in just 2 days.
• A custom component ‘Multiple picture uploader for new/edit item page’ to enable simultaneous images uploading from SharePoint libraries and file folders.
• A customized search to give users the possibility to quickly find a needed equipment or a service among more than 600 items with 30+ properties each placed on the website.

To ensure both quick and quality front-end development, SharePoint team decided to use the client-side object model (CSOM), which allowed to reduce the development time dramatically.

A special attention was paid to the website’s design. Our team customized a master page and more than 10 internal pages that included information about the group of companies, corporate news and details of the equipment and services sorted by market segments, product lines and functionality. Each item was accompanied with a ‘contact us’ button for users to request a consultation right away.

During the project’s final stage, ScienceSoft adapted the website’s desktop version to mobile devices. Using a managed metadata service, ScienceSoft additionally created pretty URLs for all the webpages.

Results

ScienceSoft’s team completed the project within the specified timeframe. The Customer got a full-fledged content-driven website that aggregated all the important information in one location enabling the website’s users to quicker find the relevant services or equipment and contact a sales representative.

Technologies and Tools

SharePoint 2013, MS SQL Server 2013, Windows PowerShell, JavaScript, jQuery, HTML, CSS.