Blue-Bag - Information Systems

Drupal Commerce for Dickies Streetwear

Blue-Bag — Tue, 22 Nov 2011 17:04:31 +0000

Customer:

Williamson-Dickie Europe Limited - 'Dickies'

We were engaged to create a socially linked ecommerce site for a new brand range of Dickies clothing - Dickies Streetwear. The brief called for a high performance state of the art site that engaged a growing customer base in the streetwear market. So rather than create a run of the mill ecommerce catalogue site we wanted to create a rich user experience based around news and social media with purchasing opportunities presented across the site.

Solution:

There is no better solution to offer for this kind of project than Drupal Commerce. This enabled us to integrate the ecommerce elements with the wider presentation of content and provide a multilingual and multicurrency site to time and budget. We have used Drupal Commerce since it came out and can't recommend it highly enough!

The site provides a strong foundation for the Streetwear brand and enables the customer to easily translate content and provide products linked to editorial and the full range of ecommerce and marketing opportunities. The site is also linked to their back office to keep stock levels updated.

We have used a wide range of commerce techniques and developed some interesting modules that we make available as open source through the Drupal Community. We'll be showcasing some of these techniques on our blog soon.

We based the site on a powerful and rich design by LoveCreative; taking their HTML5 design and turning it into a custom Drupal theme. LoveCreative are great to work with and took charge of the CSS and imagery in addition to the HTML layouts.

The site is integrated with social media with direct posting from the site to Twitter and Facebook. We also developed facebook applications for the site and will be publishing the catalogue into Facebook to enable purchase direct from the Facebook page using Drupal.

Follow them on Twitter here @dickiessw - Like them on Facebook here

In addition to the site development and build we host the site on our Drupal optimised and secure dedicated servers.

See For Yourself:

Dickies Streetwear Site

Drupal Discovery Day - Brighton

George — Sat, 10 Sep 2011 10:48:08 +0000

Drupal (pronounced drew-pull) is a Content Management System and web application development software written in a popular scripting language - PHP. Drupal has over 11,000 modules and over 1,000 themes, along with both a point and click interface to allow tech-savvy people to put together websites with no programming experience; and an API and framework for programmers to develop unique applications. Best of all, it's free, open source software!

Blue-Bag are proud to be sponsoring this great event that will show case Drupal to businesses large and small.

YourPharmacy.co.uk

Blue-Bag — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:51:27 +0000

Customer:

YourPharmacy.co.uk

We were engaged by Pelgrow UK Ltd to develop an online e-commerce solution for their network of highly successful high street pharmacies in London and across the UK. We were tasked with the design and building of the YourPharmacy brand through the design and creation of an online e-commerce store.

Solution:

The web site offers a wide range of premium products direct to the customer and plans to offer online pharmacy services such as repeat prescriptions and other pharmacy services. The web site has been delivered and is awaiting the finalisation of the product catalogue and back office delivery functions ready for launch in early 2011.

We used Drupal 6.x with Ubercart to create an engageing integrated store front where products are easily located and buying opportunities are clearly presented. Using Drupal enabled us to build in a range of facilities that work seemlessly with the purchasing flow to provide a rich site.

We developed clean and fresh theme and brand identity for the new store.

See For Yourself:

yourpharmacy.co.uk (in client acceptance)

History of Parliament Online

Blue-Bag — Wed, 13 Apr 2011 12:39:58 +0000

Customer:

History of Parliament Trust

We were engaged by the History of Parliament Trust to work on their flagship website that publishes the results of research into the members and constituencies of all British parliaments since 1386. This data rich web site is managed by the Drupal CMS and has tens of thousands of 'nodes'. We were tasked with solving various issues with the site's performance and importing data from the DTP files used to create the published volumes.

Solution:

A real challenge that required an in depth understanding of Drupal and how to get the best performance from the database and the web site code. The data import was made possible by our in-house XML translation tools. We re-factored much of the existing code and rebuilt the site using the existing 'theme' design. Due to go live in 2011 the site now performs excellently and uses a variety of caching and other performance techniques. We refactored a lot of the existing code and developed the technology 'stack' to maximise the site performance. This involved a degree to troubleshooting the Drupal installation and removing bottlenecks in the code base. The resulting site is a high performance rich Drupal site that uses the original design and navigation. The work undertaken resulted in a leaner code base and streamlined page production process. Highly significant performance gains were delivered through the use of caching and code optimisation and the reconfiguration of the server environment. This resulted in a faster, more secure site with a lower footprint.

We were also commissioned to extend the functionality of the site to present a preview version of the latest research period 1832-68. For this we used a variety of modules both custom and contributed and extensions to the existing theme to enhance the backend data editing functionality and the fron end presentation.

We also undertook integration of Google analytics and search engine optimisation ready for the site to go live. The site is currently in client and invitation review and is password protected on a public facing site on a dedicated server.

See For Yourself:

www.historyofparliamentonline.org (invite only)

Sites Using Drupal

Blue-Bag — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 15:15:27 +0000

Drupal is a very secure software framework ideally suited to providing content management and social integration platforms. It has been vetted and road-tested by some of the most security-conscious web sites on the planet: Drupal powers high profile governmental websites from the U.S. White House (whitehouse.gov) to the official website for the Mayor of London and the Greater London Authority (London.gov.uk). But they are not isolated examples as Drupal provides the framework for over 500,000 other sites across the web (e.g. organizations from data.gov.uk, the World Bank, Sony, Popular Science magazine, Harvard University, the U.S. Department of Commerce, Forrester Research, IPC , Mensa).

Drupal

Blue-Bag — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:46:44 +0000

Web content management system (WCMS) frameworks such as Drupal enable us to build custom website solutions based on a solid framework. This means that we can develop rich website solutions rapidly without our clients having to pay for us to reinvent the wheel. WCMS solutions also provide the client with full editorial control over the implemented website freeing them from being tied to a proprietary solution.

Site Maintenance and Hosting

Blue-Bag — Thu, 10 Jun 2010 14:35:31 +0000

To ensure that we are able to provide the quality of website services our clients have come to expect we provide the full services of an Internet Service Provider (ISP). This enables us to provide custom, secure and high performance website solutions. We provide services to manage the complete web presence for your website from registration and hosting through security and performance monitoring and support. This provides excellent value for money and provides a single point of contact for all aspects of managing your website; as opposed to having elements of your internet site separated across various providers. As specialist Drupal and Wordpress hosts we provide a managed service to keep your website secure and online.

Technology Articles

Blue-Bag — Tue, 25 May 2010 13:59:31 +0000

Customer:

In House

We wanted to create a home for our knowledgebase and created the website technology.blue-bag.com. Here we provide a range of articles and posts covering issues from using CMS systems such as Drupal through to security articles covering securing access to your website.

Solution:

Have you visited technology.blue-bag.com yet? We maintain a list of articles and blog posts relevant to the technologies we use on our technology.blue-bag.com web site. There are a range of guides, "how tos", FAQs and knowledge base articles that cover a wide range of topics. Articles cover using CMS systems such as Drupal and Wordpress and issues such as security and how to prevent attacks to your site, web 2.0 development, search engine optimisation and internet marketing.

We will be posting screen casts on some of the more popular tutorials and reviews of some of the latest modules and software we have evaluated.

As well as posting on topics such as how to add thumbnails to your wordpress blog we also review applications and software, modules and books.

We post regularly so it is worth following us on Twitter if you would like to be notified of new articles. We also have an RSS feed that publishes the latest articles.

See For Yourself:

Visit Now

Content Management Systems

Blue-Bag — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 12:08:03 +0000

Although we do build solutions for our clients from the ground up, we increasingly base our IT solutions on standard content management systems (CMS) such as WordPress (for simple sites and blogs) and Drupal (for more complex and tailored solutions)

Social Media Marketing

Blue-Bag — Tue, 13 Apr 2010 11:58:53 +0000

We all know the popularity of social networks such as Twitter, Facebook and the like – but have you considered how these channels can be used to widen the audience for your website information and services. Access to these services provides new and compelling opportunities for promoting your business to a wide and very immediate audience. We have a good track record of leveraging these services to provide creative marketing solutions for our clients