A modern website to meet new business objectives
When Agritex Group contacted Nmédia, the company had clear goals:
- Refresh its corporate image and website;
- Facilitate access to the John Deere products they were selling;
- Increase the number of emails and customer calls;
- Facilitate customer contact;
- Make it easier to update content.
Of course, there were many other issues at stake as well.
Issues and requirements for the website redesign
Connection to an external application programming interface (API)
The two systems had to be linked to display John Deere's new and used products on the Agritex Group website.
The new products had to come directly from John Deere's API, while the used products had to come from the database filled out by the client.
Detection of duplicate content by Google
The product sheets had to be de-indexed to avoid duplicate content in the eyes of Google due to the presentation of John Deere content on the Agritex Group site.
Review of navigation, categories and product filters
To make it easier for users to browse products, product categories needed to be reviewed by a user experience strategist (adding, removing and combining product categories).
A review of the search navigation and available filters was required to improve the user experience and search results across products.
Adding a submission form
To facilitate client contact with Agritex Group, a submission form was to be integrated into the platform.
Connecting to John Deere's API: the biggest challenge of the website redesign
The technicality and complexity of the Agritex Group website redesign were great, especially when connecting to an external API. Here's what our development team had to do to join the systems during the website redesign.
New Products: Linking John Deere's API to the Agritex Group website
To save the customer time, manually adding each new John Deere product to their website, we created a link between the John Deere API and the Agritex Group site.
To do this, our team had to categorize, distribute and manage over 500 products in the API and provide daily updates to the database. Categorization was relatively complex as new product categories, sometimes different from those in the John Deere API, had been created for the website redesign.
Also, new product search filters were developed to facilitate purchasing on the new site. These filters could only work correctly by applying features to each product, which were sometimes missing from the John Deere API.
Used products: new importer was created, a bridge between the internal database and the Agritex Group website
The used products remained with the Agritex Group, although an upgrade of the company's system was required to ensure a seamless connection with the modern technology of the new website.
We created an importer who has since formatted and restructured the data added by the client in their system.
Used products: synchronization of images
The images are not included when the customer adds used products to his database.
We had to create a new connection, this time between the folder containing over 100,000 images of used products and the records added by the client in his database. The proper product description had to match the right image when posted on the new Agritex Group site.
