Portfolio:

Websites

Your clients find you through your website: we can provide a site that makes them glad they visited.

Create a web site for the Middle East market

Our customer had opened a dealership for Gas Gas Motorcycles in the UAE to serve the Middle East area. Gas Gas Middle East asked us to take the existing global web site for the company and create a version to serve the Middle East market.

Gas Gas Middle East had merged with a small adventure tour provider in Dubai to offer desert motor tours and courses for desert bike riding. Gas Gas asked us to take the contents from the tour provider’s site and incorporate them into the new site.

In the future, Gas Gas plans to sell products and services for the Middle East market from their site, so we needed to use a design and technology that would allow eCommerce integration when they needed it, Gas Gas wanted the site to read prices and product availability directly from the ERP system, so the information on the site would be as accurate and up-to-date as possible.

Gas Gas wanted to offer a separate mobile application instead of using a responsive design for its website. The mobile application would let Gas Gas provide additional services for their customers, like “Call for help” and “Prepare my bike” services.

Gas Gas wanted to have a contact form that would be available from several places on their web site. The data submitted through the contact form would go to a dedicated company mailbox and would also create an entry in the OpenERP system we manage for them.

Challenges

Our first great challenge was to obtain the design specifications for the Gas Gas global site, so we could work with them for the Middle-East-specific version of the site. The original site had evolved over a period of time, using different technologies and design styles, so it was impossible to find a single source for the design. Furthermore, the design style differed from section to section, making the site visually unattractive.

The adventure tours site was designed and organized differently from the Gas Gas global site, so a simple merge of content was out of question.

We could find no previous example of integratina a WordPress form with OpenERP, so we had to design and create a bridge between the systems.

Our solution

When we accepted this project, we knew that this would be a good showcase for our ability to provide a unified, end-to-end solution for business.

Technology and tools used

The task that lay ahead of us was complex. We knew that we would need to select the proper tools and technologies in order to provide the best quality for our client.

We chose WordPress as our CMS platform for two main reasons:

• WordPress is a modular platform that makes it easy to create custom layouts
• There are lots of open-source plug-ins available from the WordPress community which we could use to speed up our development of the site

Unified visual style

To address the design discrepancies on the global site, we had to use a creative approach. We created a new design style closely resembling the main features of the global site. At the same time, our new design unified the visual style across all site areas.

Building the bridge

Building the bridge between OpenERP and WordPress was the most difficult task in this project. The performance of the bridge directly impacts the performance of the site, so we needed to provide caching and synchronization strategies.

Integration with mobile application

We used a JSON plug-in to provide the data feed for our mobile application. This way, we were able to re-use the same data source for both the web site and the mobile application, simplifying future maintenance, feature additions, and content updates.