Project Overview
Irish Aisle is the largest player in the custom Irish wedding market space bringing Irish brides and vendors together. Each year thousands of brides plan their culturally enriched bridal experience using the resources that Irish Aisle provides. Irish Aisle needed to have a flexible CMS system created from scratch that would meet their desire to control, edit and add content to the site, while maintaining the site’s clear elegance and smooth design features. Active Web Group was hired by the management of Irish Aisle based on past successes of other high end CMS designs done for clients such as Steinway Piano and Elco Motor Yachts.
Challenges
It is always a challenge when designing a CMS system for a site that represents a brand of distinction and elegance. It is very important that the client is given control to edit the site while putting in the correct fixed elements and security to keep the brand elegance protected. Irish Aisle management had never used any type of CMS before and they had no in-house design skills. They did wish, however, to be able to edit the site themselves, but not cause great harm to the look and feel. With the experienced Active Web Group team, we knew we could meet the challenges management faced while giving them the control they needed.
Goal
The main goal of the project was to install a CMS that would enable Irish Aisle’s management to bring the website to life with a constant flow of content and page expansion. The leaders at Irish Aisle recognized that in order to keep the fast moving bridal market niche interested, the site needed to live and breathe with new content, graphics and pages on a regular basis. The site needed to become a communication tool for brides and perspective vendors and be able to rapidly adapt to changes.
Solution
Irish Aisle was given a CMS system with a fixed design framework to protect the layout of pages and a multi-level secure administration system to protect areas of the site. A rich text editor was added as well, along with several proprietary design tools for non-designers to enable the management to add and edit fairly complicated graphics and links on the site. Several elements were built in to protect the site against errors such as forced preview before publishing and dual approvals on certain pages. Pages that were being edited are also saved for five days to allow a restore in the event of an error. The management was trained in one full day on all the new features of their site.
Success
The proof is in the Irish pudding as they say! Irish Aisle is thrilled with their new site and so are their customers. They said “we have never received so many compliments from our clients about how cool our web site is and how quickly it is updated”. Irish Aisle feels they are now more completely accomplishing their mission statement of bringing enriched ethnic bridal experiences to Irish brides in America. Active Web Group is proud to have been of service and looks forward to continued work with Irish Aisle as their business expands.
Services Offered
Irish Aisle has used Active Web Group for Email Marketing, CMS design, Programming, Site Design and will begin Search Engine Optimization in 2011.
Service: Content Management System
Client: Irish Aisle
Web Site: www.irishaisle.com
