The Customer. GeosIdeal is the leading Belarusian manufacturer of solid wood kitchens:
- 25 years of experience in the market of Belarus and Russia,
- about 250 professionals on the staff,
- over 100 stores.
The Challenge. The CSF webtools studio was set the task to develop the corporate website Gi.by, an effective tool for communication with prospective buyers and dealers of the factory. The site is supposed to be a showcase of products and the sales network in Belarus, Russia, Ukraine and Crimea. Furthermore, it was necessary to organize effective on-site communication between the factory and its dealers in all cities, where GeosIdeal has stores. This task was the second priority, but it turned out to be the most difficult one and required lots of efforts and time.
Some functional requirements were formulated as well: ease of maintenance, scalability and adaptation of the system to changing tasks, transparency for search engines, speed, compliance with the current brand book of the company, ease of operation, and conformity with the level of the best solutions in the industry.
The Solution. The CSF webtools team created a product with a rational and clear structure of the website and catalogue, convenient dealer accounts, as well as proper operation on all devices. The scale of the dealer network and specific POS in the operating cities is displayed; there is a precise description of the collection with high quality photos.
Focus was on the section “Where to Order”, a crucial one that required maximum convenience:
- user geolocation down to the city level;
- manual sorting by country and city with stats of operations;
- a geo-map of the country with a display of the entire network and cities with GeosIdeal operations;
- a geo-map of the city displaying the city’s POS with the “Nearest POS” mechanism;
- POS descriptions with an effective package of necessary information and an individual geo-map.
Ninety percent of operational communications is via dealer accounts: news, promos, announcements, file archives. The dealer’s staff are responsible for the update and editing of data on a respective POS in the cities of operation. Special attention is paid to the convenience and clarity of work with the account.
After the implementation of the web solution and adding content, the choice of the hosting platform becomes the next key parameter. After all, the website Gi.by should work fast and be available 100% of the time.
The current system loads are as follows:
- inbound traffic — up to 10,000 visits per day;
- simultaneous work of dozens of dealers in their accounts: views of designated documents, downloads of large files, updates in more than 100 POS and dozens of samples;
- site updates by administrators and improvements by developers.
Requirements for the platform:
- high quality prompt technical support capable of perfectly configuring the host for the system;
- optimized Bitrix hosting with mandatory availability of Bitrix Environment;
- fast resource scalability of the host and safety margin;
- acceptable platform and service fees.
The above requirements are simultaneously the reasons why CloudServer from ActiveCloud was picked. The Cloud 2 pricing plan was a good choice: the cloud can maintain the system at peak loads, 100% uptime is ensured, and technical support is efficient.
The Results and Future Plans. A clear and functional website describing the main aspects of the enterprise was created. It brought about an increase in the number of applications for dealership and expansion of the dealer network. In addition, the website served as a foundation for future development — it is now possible to consistently develop the website and put in place a serious Internet marketing campaign.
Half a year since the launch of the site, joint work on the project is still underway. Recent achievements include:
1. Two cycles of improvements of usability parameters of various interfaces and mechanics of the website;
2. SEO-tuning of control mechanics and external parameters of the website;
3. Server resources consumption analysis and additional settings of ActiveCloud technical support together with CSF webtools specialists.
