It’s not always easy to tell people how cool your latest software project was. One of the biggest challenges of software development is making things that are in fact quite complicated seem easy. Sometimes looking back towards past solutions you once viewed as novel or unique, you think to yourself – “Of course, how else would I have done that?” Stepping through this doorway brings you a new appreciation for what you’ve learned through the successes and failures discovered along the way. This column is about those little solutions that are sometimes forgotten with time. In several select projects, I’ll discuss a recent project and the parts that I thought made them unique and interesting. My hope is to shed light on some of the love and care that goes into each one of our software projects, but is rarely seen by the end-user. The first site I’d like to discuss is the corporate website for Continental Warranty.
Background
One of the largest extended auto warranty companies in the nation, Continental Warranty, sought our expertise to develop a cost-effective solution capable of bolstering its online sales and improve the quality of information shared between its internal departments and external stakeholders.
Our solution was to create a central platform to help manage the many different touch-points of Continental Warranty's online business. To ensure that product data remained current, we devised a content management solution every bit as fluid as their changing industry. Complex information previously communicated through unwieldy Excel spreadsheets was now articulated to prospective customers in real time and managed through a simple to use web interface. To improve efficiency of Continental's lead capture process, we built a software tool to keep all 30+ of CW's landing pages in perfect sync with the rest of the organization. To enhance communication between CW and its many partners, we built a system that allowed marketing staff to share creative such like banners and email messages with external vendors.
Building a Better Plan Finder
The first challenge we had to overcome was how to organize the many number of rules required to match customers with different auto warranty plan. The solution this problem was actually quite easy and we quickly created for them a customized control-panel driven solution to manage the different auto plan data, through one easily controlled web panel.
The end result was a very easy to use, customized solution that made updates significantly easier and less error prone.
[ see images 1 – 3 ]
Centralizing 30+ landing pages
The second challenged we faced was much more complicated. CW had 30 different landing pages that shared very similar data, but each one had its own codebase. When CW changed its lead process, this change had to be propagated across all 30 websites.
After reviewing several similar solutions, we decided it would be cheapest to build our own custom solution from the ground up. Using Ruby on Rails and Apache, we developed one software application which could serve all 30+ websites.
As web requests were sent through apache, our Rails application interpreted the request and found the template, logic, and web form rules that would be used for the domain. This allowed us to have 30 different domains all hosted by the same application.
To promote synchronicity with the main CW website, we built a webservices platform which was used to share information between the two apps. This way, vehicle and plan information could be safely shared between the two applications without redundancy.
[ see screenshots ]