Background
A premier competition of its kind, International Wine and Spirit Competition (IWSC), aims to promote the quality and excellence of the world’s best wines, spirits and liqueurs. Supported by many of the world’s top wine and spirit producers, the competition sets the international benchmark of quality. The event receives entries from around 90 countries from across the globe and judges them according to their class.
The Opportunity
When IWSC approached us for redesigning the competition website, their key requirement was to come up with a user friendly registration and product entry process on the IWSC existing website. The group also sought to give a fresh look to the user interface. While IWSC was already a well known and reputed competition in the world of wines and spirits, the group was keen on expanding its horizon and to start several competitions across different regions and continents. And for this, the IWSC also planned to build several separate sites for those events eventually.
Our Approach
We reviewed, analysed and discussed the requirements with IWSC, both from an immediate and future perspective. Our recommended approach was to implement a common website platform that could host all competition websites to help IWSC create and manage multiple competition websites rapidly.
Some key but powerful capabilities that the solution has:
- Features developed for one website are re-usable for other websites reducing the time and effort.
- A common Content Management System (CMS) for all websites which is self manageable by IWSC’s administration.
- Web service based interfaces to integrate with backend operation support system.
Some key architectural aspects that we considered:
- Scalability of building and deploying new features across websites.
- Ease and speed of deploying new competition sites.
- Reduction in future deployment and maintenance costs.
- Ease of system administration.
- Extensibility to connect backend systems to support end to end automation of IWSC’s business processes.
Technology We Used
In order to fulfill the architectural requirement our challenge was to select a ready-to-use platform that offers both effective Content Management features and flexibility to build additional features to fulfill the business requirements. Careful analysis of various available platforms lead us to select an Open Source technology, Drupal as it fulfilled all the key architectural considerations. We extended Drupal to efficiently provide regular data feeds and it’s synchronisation with backend systems by using Web Services using SOAP over HTTP.
The Result
The new website design came up with an attractive look to the user interface and imparted information clearly. The product entry procedure was made much simpler and the registration process was made more user-centric, where users can even opt for multiple entries with much ease.In total, we gave IWSC a cost effective solution where technology coherently supported business scalability.