Chronicle Books
“I just wanted to share our success with you. But especially to thank you SO much for making me look good, and most importantly, for making this possible. Working with you guys has been such a pleasant contrast to my experience surrounding our previous redesign. The promotion was a HUGE hit on the site… we nearly quintupled our average monthly sales… I won't throw any more stats at you, but I predict the new site redesign will pay for itself by the end of the month.”
— Liza Hazen, Chronicle Books
Client
Chronicle Books, largest North American independent publisher of color-rich books, journals, cards, and giftware
Challenge
Nonfunctional web infrastructure, data salvaging
Chronicle Books came to SolutionSet with a non functional web infrastructure. The company who originally built the site vanished, leaving Chronicle with a code base (Java/MySQL) that no longer performed adequately and troubleshooting problems that never ended. Chronicle wore itself out just trying to keep the system running, and cumbersome legacy systems requiring daily inventory and sales data from the web system were an added complication. Chronicle did not want to throw away the valuable data and content from its site, but they did not know how to move forward with their website needs.
Solution
Dynamic infrastructure replacement integrated with existing data
SolutionSet’s consultants met with Chronicle Books in person to define the challenges facing their website, swiftly adopt Chronicle’s problems as their own, and give relief to Chronicle’s exhausted internal team. Together SolutionSet and Chronicle chose and implemented an open source solution, giving Chronicle quick and continued access to future upgrades and to a large community of enthusiastic, approachable experts on the program. SolutionSet customized this open source solution to meet Chronicle’s unique requirements, then implemented the design (by Method), personality, and technical infrastructure of the site, importing all existing merchandise data from the current system. SolutionSet completely integrated the new sleek, streamlined site with the old legacy inventory systems and ran full systems tests before launch. The final product: a fully-functioning e-commerce website with zero re-entry of data.
Results
400% increase in sales
500% minimum rise in responsiveness of same hardware/software
0 data input needed by Chronicle staff, as all existing information was maintained and transferred
Technology Used
_PHP/MySQL
_Zen Cart for E-Commerce Functionality
_Custom code for CMS and Additional Functions
_HTML/CSS
Visit www.chroniclebooks.com