A December launch: Arasan.com
December 27th, 2011 by Gage Pacifera
It has been a busy month for Harmonic Northwest! I helped launch four different sites in the course of so many weeks. The biggest of those was a project I’ve been working on for the past several months with McClenahan Bruer, a revamp of arasan.com. Harmonic Northwest was involved from the very start helping scope the project, figuring out what platform to develop on, collaborating on information architecture, creating wireframes and then actually developing the site. The design work was done by Leigh Brooks at McBru and most of the content was created and inserted by the client through the site’s WordPress interface. Check it out at:
The Lowdown
Arasan Chip Systems puts together IP solutions for building computer-y electronics. So if you wanted to build a fancy new wi-fi enabled handheld thigamajig, you might hit these guys up for a blueprint to get you started.
The main challenge in putting this site together was creating a products section. They have upwards of 80 products that they sell and we had to put together a relatively understandable navigation scheme to help customers find what they’re looking for. The page for each product would need to contain a lot of information including a description, images, specs, features list, diagram, other related products, etc. Arasan has downloadable datasheets for its products that are only available to registered users, so we had to make it possible for a client to sign in and download the datasheets attached to each product.
In addition to those features, they needed a blog, a contact form, a place to put media like white pages, some social media integration, etc.
The Solutions
We built the site on a WordPress platform which allowed the client to easily add and edit content. There’s the usual WYSIWYG editor plus extra content boxes for the tab content and for the related items. Each product page also has a file upload box that allows the client to upload a PDF that can be downloaded by registered users. There are also special includable pages set up for image maps, diagrams and for each of the banner images on the home page. The site also allows for tracking in Google Analytics, Woopra and editing of SEO metadata on a page-by-page basis. Video was handled by the ever-so-versatile JW Player.
The site also has some great registration features. Users sign up and are emailed a password. Once signed in, they can download datasheets and edit their account information. Downloads are tracked and that information is packaged to be used in Netsuite tracking software. Users can also reset a forgotten password via email.
The organization of the product pages is determined by the page hierarchy in WordPress. If you add a page as a child of another page, it will appear under it in the sidebar navigation. To change what category a page appears under, the client simply has to change the parent of the page in a dropdown menu. This makes editing and updating the product structure super convenient.