The Challenge
Founded in 2002, Bella Pictures is an award-winning company that is transforming the wedding photography and videography industry. Bella's technology-driven approach brings new standards of quality, service and transparency to capturing and sharing your wedding memories. What the organization needed was a more flexible system that allowed them to react and adapt to an ever-changing market in a cost efficient manner. The real question was where to start. Replacing the current website with a new platform was unrealistic. Bella's technical team, led by Steve Morgan, chose to start with StudioBlue.com, a new property focused on the cost-conscience side of today's wedding market. They chose Drupal, and Ubercart, for the renowned flexibility and the frameworks proven track record in SEO.
The key goals the technical team wanted to accomplish were as follows:
- Develop a Drupal/Ubercart website in less than two months
- Prove Drupal could truly meet their organizational challenges
- Integrate transactional data into the existing Bella infrastructure
- Customize the shopping cart to allow for a recurring payment plan
- Create reusable code to allow partner websites on the same basic code base
- Allow the in-house team to maintain and make future enhancements
- Repurpose code base to future BellaPictures.com project
With the project and platform in place the Bella Pictures team realized they didn't have the bandwidth or the depth of Drupal knowledge to complete the task successfully. They chose to partner with Achieve Internet due to our extensive experience in Drupal architecture, integration, module customization and overall project management. Together Bella Pictures and Achieve had a winning formula for the planning, architecture, development and coding of the Studio Blue site so that it meet all of their performance goals, functionality requirements and end user experience expectations.
The Solution
A key point of emphasis to Bella was that their internal development team needed to be included and work hand in hand with the Achieve Development Team so in the future they could manage and enhance all their Drupal sites. One of the reasons Bella turned to Achieve was due to their reputation of happily working with internal teams on other projects. This also made sense since the StudioBlue.com platform was going to be leveraged to create branded websites for Bella's partner program.
The first real challenge was registration. As always it is important to make sure the correct data was being collected, especially since this new property needed to integrate with the existing Bella Pictures infrastructure. Built on the Cake PHP framework the current infrastructure is responsible for everything from scheduling to payment processing. Achieve separated scheduling from registration and ran it as a standalone item. This streamlined the registration process and allowed the visitor to interact with the true power of Bella without the stress of commitment.
Ultimately the largest technical issue for the project surrounded Payment Plan options. In today's economy Bella felt it was important to give couples the option to set up a payment plan to make the purchase easier on couples' bank accounts. To accomplish this task Achieve wrote a custom module to handle this complex ordering process between Drupal, Ubercart and the Authorize.net system. This custom module ensured payment reminders were properly scheduled, sent and accurately accounted for in the Bella ordering system.
The Result
Achieve created a site for Bella that organized all their desired information into an easy to use architecture, which can be leveraged by Bella’s development team to future branded websites within Bella’s portfolio.
Achieved
Removed the guesswork and hassle of in picking and paying for a wedding photographer by integrating Ubercart and creating a unique buying experience. Bella’s Studio Blue now gives user the user the access to the information they want with ease. Achieve developed and trained Bella’s internal team so that they can easily repurpose all the code to be used on future branded website.