Case Study: Litecontrol
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Litecontrol is a leader in the design, development, manufacture, and marketing of high quality architectural lighting systems with two manufacturing facilities located in Hanson and Plympton, Massachusetts.When Litecontrol decided to redesign its website, the company hoped to create a new web presence with a wide range of functionality to support the efforts of its sales reps. The new site would need to include an advanced extranet system to allow reps to register online for a user name and password that would give them access to a wealth of private information about Litecontrol and its product lines. Through the extranet, reps would need to be able to change their personal information and, once logged in, view restricted content and data within a site environment that's also open to the general public.
For the Litecontrol project, the development team at Newfangled Web Factory employed its grayscreen prototyping process to help define the structure, content, and functionality of the new site. The prototype process allowed the development team to communicate clearly and effectively with Litecontrol's staff as they gathered ideas and feedback, organized site content, and worked together to refine the site from an information design perspective. Without such a clear and effective process in place, it would have been virtually impossible to define the structure of such a large and complex website.
The Litecontrol site uses the Newfangled content management system for content control. The NewfangledCMS provides the interface through which Litecontrol's non-technical content providers are able to add and edit their site content. Staff members can log in and easily upload new product information, FAQs, app sheets, product images, company information, employee data, and news items among other types of content. Paul Duane, the Vice President of New Products and Marketing for Litecontrol, explains:
"When we were considering proposals for the development project, the NewfangledCMS was of particular interest to us. Now that we have been live with the site I can say that it is extremely useful and functional. We use it almost daily to manage the content in our current site, and it has been very robust technically. Being able to have different people in our organization (engineering, customer service, marketing, human resources) actually manage (edit, update, etc) the content for which they are responsible is very powerful and the key to our goal of getting efficient and timely information online."
The finished Litecontrol site was given a very professional visual design, created by Newfangled's design team. As with the site's content, Litecontrol's visual design requirements were also quite complex. With a typical website, the visual design consists of two or three levels of unique design, namely a home page, sub page, and navigation menu. However, in the case of Litecontrol, Newfangled created dozens of unique designs for individual site pages to draw the site’s visual interest deep into the site.
The finished site included a number of particularly useful features. The most notable of these features is the intricate and specialized product system that was crafted to make product information available to all users with a minimal number of clicks. As mentioned before, the product system includes password-protected content that only appears to reps that visit the product pages after logging into the site with a valid user name and password. Additionally, the product section is equipped with a number of custom searching mechanisms that expand upon the basic site searching tools.
Litecontrol has been very pleased with their web investment. Paul Duane highlights this by saying:
"I certainly recommend Newfangled Web Factory. They are knowledgeable, helpful, and competitive. We were pleased with the service provided by Newfangled on the development of our website. We continue to work with them on maintenance, upgrades and hosting of our site. I find everyone in their organization to be very conscientious and responsive to our questions or concerns. They have proven to have a strong range of expertise - from programming to visual design to information structure design."
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