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Shaw & Sons
Shaw & Sons are publishers, printers and suppliers of general and specialist stationery, legal forms, electoral services and a wide range of products for local government, including civic ceremonial items.
This website is one of the largest online shops Novamedia has produced, selling over 24,000 products to both existing Shaw's account holders and to new customers. The site was completely custom-built to the client's specification, integrated with SagePay, and gives Shaw's complete control over their huge range of products, discounts, offers and the categories these products are displayed within. The administration module that controls all of these functions parses data from their existing product databases - contained within offline databases and text files - and merges them into one integrated database. This allows the staff at Shaw & Sons much more flexibility in managing the varied product range and how it is displayed on the website.
As well as the online shop, Shaw & Sons' website also includes a section for promoting their bespoke work - using Lightbox technology to display large photos of their products, and a section which contains the latest news and updates from the company.
Tech
Data from all over the place
One of the main challenges in the Shaws website was getting the products database set up. There were three main sources of data: their stationery products, their forms products and all of their other products.
For the stationery products we had to set up a system that allows them to regularly merge a very large database of products from a major stationery supplier into their online products database. This was made more difficult because the products are stored in an Access database and the prices separately in a CSV file and we had to get all of this into a MySQL database.
Having achieved that, we then had to set up a system that allowed the other products to sit alongside the stationery in the same database. This was achieved by using the industry-standard stationery products classification and extending it by adding our own custom classifications for all of the other products. Staff at Shaws then populated the database template we supplied with thousands of their own products before we merged the whole thing together to make one seamless products database for use on the site.
We then produced a custom-built admin system for the client to administer the products going forward.
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