M1NT – World’s First Shareholders’ Club
Client Needs
Online marketing and branding through the web have taken more and more weight into M1NT’s branding and communication strategy, previous website had become a limiting factor that could no longer fully reflect the company’s dynamism and innovative spirit. The website should be filled with picture galleries, videos, and other great presentation content about the venues, in order to attract a younger audience to engage with M1NT for bookings and memberships online. For the lounge and restaurant, the concept of the site had to be oriented towards quality and lifestyle, as part of a global marketing strategy, along with the existing magazine and Newsletters features.
Collaboration with Davyin
Many important actors of M1NT, including top executives, were involved in the project, but it was lead mostly in collaboration by M1NT’s Marketing department. During meetings, Davyin’s project manager would raise issues specific to web design and provided implementation choices that would accomplish overall technical requirements, particularly on the issues of Search Engine Optimization and performance. Content input was coordinated during later stages of the project when the website started moving to its test and pre-production phases. At the same time, the administration of the website was smoothly transferred to the M1NT IT team who had previously received a complete training from Davyin on software management.
Our approach & Solution
Having a very dynamic content base, the M1NT website had to be built on a solid content management system that could fully allow the editing team to perform regular content updates with quick turnover times. As a result, Javascript was selected over Flash to produce smooth and subtle animations enhancing content, with short loading times and still complying with search engines’ standards. A large effort had to be made on the administrative back-end side as well, in order to provide M1NT’s website editors with accessible content management interfaces, clear menus and submission guidelines on content creation forms. The site also required several optimizations in order to load numerous visual elements faster.
Key features
1 – [Front End solutions] Javascript/Flash:
A wide variety of effects, client side Javascript plugins, and Flash were employed to achieve a visually rich user interface:
- In general, the site makes heavy use of the lightweight Open Source JQuery library shipped with Drupal to fulfill a wide range of actions. From effects for slide down help menus, toggle or fade in/out images to DOM manipulations and AJAX, everything relies on the JQuery framework and few additional extensions were required;
- To start with, a higher level of graphical rendering could only be achieved by making heavy use of PNG images (with alpha transparency), known for creating browser compatibility issues (in particular with MS Internet Explorer 6) that were successfully solved with the excellent Jquery PNGFix plugin.;
- Another JQuery highlight is on the ease and comfort provided by its Ajax component for asynchronous form submission. The JQuery AJAX component was employed along with the Drupal AJAX framework acting as the server side handler and allowing browsing of gallery images without page refresh;
2 – SEO:
Initially, friendly urls were setup to allow visitors and search engines to identify keywords in link addresses. The path to any page can be configured very easily through the back-end or automatically generated by the system according to predefined patterns. Then, essential to the tracking of website traffic, Google Analytics was setup to provide valuable statistics on keywords, most visited pages and allow for a better positioning on Google and other main search engines (Yahoo!, MS Live/Bing, Baidu, etc…). The site also features dynamic XML sitemaps that were manually submitted to various search engines to monitor crawlers’ activity and ensure content is indexed with an acceptable frequency.
3 – Drupal:
Since management of its online content base and website was one of the key aspects of the project, Davyin Internet Solutions installed, configured and fully customized the award-winning Open Source Content Management System Drupal, to build a sustainable website that could be maintained and further extended by M1NT employees. From a content management perspective, numerous content types were customized to fit to different sections and natures of content. Content pages, agenda and blog items, Slideshow images, forms, and many more items can be managed and edited through specific forms available in the extensive back-end provided by Drupal. In terms of media, the website is also very flexible in allowing addition of image albums to the gallery or videos embedded from third party websites (such as Youku, Tudou or YouTube!). However, customization of the front-end, in particular the theming and template layer is perhaps the part that required the most custom coding. The Zen template engine came in particularly handy to implement different templates for different sections of the website or specific parts of a page such as blocks and menus.
Results
The main concept of the site is to give visitors the first-hand experience of what it could be like to be an exclusive member of M1NT through luxurious presentations of shaded galleries of stars and prestigious venues. More than just a nice storefront, M1NT website provides fully functional forms integrated with Paypal enabling direct transformation of site’s traffic. The Booking forms, Membership cards registry, and Event’s Calendars are just a few of these forms that were built with integrated user interfaces on the website. Furthermore, in order to leverage online brand identity with a prominent and active presence on the web, features such as newsletters and magazine view pages were incorporated to enhance the marketing strategy which was to generate more potential leads through a wider variety of channels. This objective also allowed M1NT to portray itself as having more shares on the market, which led in return to a stronger confidence from investors. In conclusion, we are particularly grateful to M1NT for their trust and agreeable cooperation throughout the project to build a solid asset for its strategic web marketing and brand image campaign.
Testimonial
Fanny Landrieu, Marketing Manager:
“At first, I had sought in Davyin Internet Solutions as a solid technical partner that would be able to support our web development needs. After working with the motivated and dynamic team, I was impressed with their professionalism and personable service attitudes. I was even more delighted that Davyin was able to satisfy our web marketing needs by implementing innovative approaches and customized solutions.
The team was also extremely easy to communicate with, equipped with intuitive sense of different industry requirements. I understood during the course of the project that creativity and flexibility are key factors to completing the website– both of which are qualities Davyin delivered to our door. Davyin has indubitably become a stable IT partner with whom I am more than happy to work with again on various projects in the future.”
Technology used
PHP/XHTML/CSS/Javascript
Case studies
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Testimonial
