Plowing Through Projects

Category: • Digirawr News • Web Design
Posted on: Wed, September 22nd, 2010

The past few months have been quite busy for us at DigiRawr, after our site launched. We had our hands busy with projects both large and small across many different industries, but for now we would like to write a bit about two of our more recent projects.

The first of these projects was for a chain of veterinary clinics that deal primarily with specialized medical care and emergency care for pets. California Veterinary Specialists (CVS) was one of our larger projects, as our client requested many features for the site. These features include:

• Customized articles and news section for posting new announcements; works much like a blog.

• Extensive Staff and Services pages, complete with portraits, galleries, and short biographies.

• Fancy galleries for our custom-written Testimonials section.

• Google Maps API implementation for searching clinic locations by proximity (by entering a zipcode, city, or address).

• Full directions implementation for location search results for easy access in getting directions to a clinic.

• Specialized forms for employment application and prescription refill.

• Extensive administrator controls to manage staff members on the site, appoint them to various specialties like Cardiology or Emergency Care, manage testimonials and articles, etc.


During the design process, the CVS looks and feel changed drastically over the course of development as we communicated with our client, as the client felt comfortable having more and more features. We also gave our client constant consultation over various decisions, and many times talked the client out of certain ideas that may sound good on paper, but in actuality is an annoyance for users. For example, the client wanted automatically-playing music on CVS, which we said was a bad idea, as it can be distracting (especially if a user is already playing music while browsing), or worst, frustrating for users.



The other large project that we developed is an online e-book retailer, Dittostore, which competes directly with the likes of Barnes & Nobles, Borders, and etc. Dittostore is a fully-functional e-commerce site with features which include:

• Fully-functional, custom-written shopping cart built specifically for the features required for the site.

• Complete merchant account API integration for automated payment information verification and payment transactions.

• Implementation of a 3rd party API that specializes in providing electronic content to populate the site with all the current e-books and their relevant marketing images and text.

• Implemented custom-written script to update new e-book content on a nightly basis.

• Extensive administrator features to set profit margins, set coupon codes (by raw $ off or % off), review purchase orders, and etc.

• Simple and advanced search functions for users to quickly find titles.

• Implemented all standard organizing features such as sorting by price, release date, title, author, etc, and simple pagination.

With over 250,000 titles in the database, efficiency was a top priority when we were building the website. We minimized usage of fancy Javascripts and CSS images, and only called on the most vital scripts to insure that the site would work smoothly with one user browsing it to a hundred thousand users browsing it a day.

Google Chrome attests our attention to efficiency, as a first-time visitor to the Dittostore homepage will only take 1-2s to load, while some other pages such as Best Sellers, or New Releases take only 500ms to 1 second to load. As a comparison, the Yahoo homepage, takes 1.9s to load on average on Google Chrome a new user with nothing cached.






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