Premier School Agendas Ltd. Is a student success and education services company with
offices located in Langley, BC, Canada, and Bellingham, WA, USA.

Premier is specialized in manufacturing and distributing large selections of customized Student  Success Agendas and Character development resources. Their goal is to meet the unique needs of every school and their students in USA and Canada. 

 What made this project happen

Prior to October 2005, Premier's website consisted of a series of static and semi-dynamic pages written in HTML and Perl. According to premier's staff, it was very difficult to update the website. In fact every update request, placed by Marketing and Product Development (MPD) team, could have taken days or weeks to heppen.

The online catalog did not effectively present the relationships among Premier's marketing material and their products, likewise the relationships among multiple different products they've carried.

Web pages where not using W3C standard HTML code. They had large files sizes and  not properly search engine optimized (SEO). Pages were also cluttered with too much unnecessary information and hyper links. Premier's corporate website also lacked visual consistency on different sections.

Merits of Premier's online presence were being compromised.

Diagnosis

The reason that content update would have taken so long was mainly because a large portion of Premier's website content was mashed with the HTML and Perl code used to construct the body of the website.  In other words, content and presentation layer were not separated properly, and for each update request, the Technology Solutions team had to dive into a cluster of poorly written code and make changes. This could have been a very time consuming process.

Short comings in the website Information Architecture (IA) , were due to the lack of a corporate data model that could properly represent the relationships among Premier's marketing material and their products, moreover the relationship among multiple different products. They also needed to look into their product-line's general growth pattern through previous years. Investing few sessions on Business Systems Analysis, could clear up these confusions and improve their online e-Catalog.

Large file size web pages and poor SEO were due to the poorly written HTML code used for building the website. Later on we've learned that page layout had been outsourced to a large Graphic Design and Advertisement agency. What they've received looked visually dazzling however, pages where produced using web authoring tools such as Macromedia Dreamweaver, and they contained too many unnecessary graphics and HTML tags. Content of the website was literally trapped inside layers of nested HTML tables; a situation that made it difficult for search engine bots to reach and properly index the content.

Signs of Life

Through multiple sessions with key stakeholders, we collaborated on developing the company's Data Model and their product-line's growth pattern. The product of business system analysis was the blue print for Premier's customized e-Catalog component which we later on developed using Joomla! CMS in less than 3 months.

Joomla! CMS is one of the best open source content management systems today with  modular software architecture and easy to use Administration Interface; a proper choice to contain Premier's marketing and product information.

We also developed strategies on how to organize, structure, and enter Premier's information into the CMS. Management and staff in Marketing and Technology solutions were trained on maintaining the website in a collaborative manner using the online CMS. This became a popular features, since the Technology Solutions team is located in Canada, and Marketing team is located in USA.

Using a CMS enabled us to separate content from the website's body and store it in a database. Website can now be updated without having to be reprogrammed each time which could have taken days or weeks.

A set of Joomla Templates were also developed according to Premier's identity guideline to provide a consistent look throughout the corporate website.  

The new web pages are also much lighter and search engine optimized (SEO), because they use significantly less HTML tables and more CSS to render.