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The Paint Bar web site accepts online reservations and gift cards to let their clients sign-up for classes with ease.
The Paint Bar is a small business with locations in Newton and Boston that is thriving in the growing market of Paint and Sip. It was the first of its kind in the Northeast and as they grew and added locations, their website did not expand with them. Because the website is such a crucial point of their business it was very important to bring it up to date design wise and make it more usable. A large amount of their customers book online and creating an intuitive well designed website to facilitate bookings would ensure The Paint Bar continued on with success.
One of the biggest challenges on this project was integrating a new payment provider for the client. Mercury payment gateway was a new provider that they wished to use so they could easily accept payments online, and also sell gift cards in the store. Secondly, the client wanted to be able to update content on their own and manage all bookings from one single interface. This meant we needed to find a flexible Content Management System that allowed for easy expansion with custom modules. Lastly, a clean user interface for tablet and mobile would allow for more bookings by customers in the ever expanding mobile world. It also would facilitate letting users know what they needed to do upon arrival for classes and what to wear, etc.
The Cloud Construct team went to work by meeting directly with the client and learning about their needs and customer base. Our User Experience team made sure we covered all our bases surrounding usability, and then we optimized the booking process since it was the most important. Next our design team went to work creating a truly unique design for the client. The Paint Bar being a creative, fun, and expressive business needed a web design that was synonymous with that. As you can see from the responsive design results at the bottom of the page, the design truly embodied what the Paint Bar was all about. The staff and the paintings they do truly separate them from competitors and this was brought to the forefront here.
On the technical end we utilized Orchard CMS to give the client all of the functionality they needed. We added user types to the CMS for Paint Bar staff to manage content, upload new class information, and manage bookings all from the Orchard dashboard. Next we had to integrate with Mercury payment gateways so we could sell gift cards and process credit cards. We did this by creating a custom module to process all payments and gift card transactions. Gift cards could now be sold in store and via the web along with creating offer codes for promotional campaigns.
For hosting we chose Windows Azure as our platform because the management of it is literally hands off. Backups, data storage, and database management all is encapsulated as a service from Azure and we can ensure the necessary checkpoints are in place for a site like this. Secondly. the client can easily expand on busy days to multiple web instances to accommodate heavy traffic flow. Days like Cyber Monday and the first day of a new painting calendar being released no longer would suffer outtages or slow downs for clients.
The result of this project was a success. The client can now offer a web solution to clients that shows the professionalism of the business and that makes their day to day easier. Backend office tasks are much simpler now and more time can be spent painting and tending to the customer needs in class. Lastly, providing a responsive design enabled the Paint Bar to take advantage of a whole new market share of mobile users. They are ready for the future now and can be ensured their website can now scale with them.
