Web development. E-commerce: 'Webgastronom'

Brand new web site / e-commerce platform for a brand new business. The main purpose of this project was to provide technical capability for a start-up business to trade online. Easy it may sound, the business analysis releaved multiple facets, constraints and hidden requirements that we had to take into account. However this project was completed successfully and the business was launched on-time and within budget.

Launching a website these days is not a rocket science. Launching an e-commerce site is a bit more complicated, as it involves many stakeholders, constraints and requirements (e.g. Client wants to use a particular 3-party payment processing system, or has a certain server operating platform etc). So here come our Business Analysis skills: fact finding, diagramming, use cases, interviews and finally - a priliminary scope for approval and project initiation.

Constraints

The task was to get the site up and running by mid September (in 4 weeks). This will be a Russian shop, selling russian and eastern european foods, films and other ethnic merchandise, not traditionally/widely sold in the UK, so the target audience is Russian speaking residents. The front end to have a multilingual searchable product catalogue, wish list, gift certificates, bonus points, shopping cart (obviously), contact forms, news section, banner system, 'recently viewed', 'most popular', products tags, 'email to a friend', 'leave comment', limited budget. The backend requirements were: CMS, payment gateway seamless integration, reporting system, banner management, stock management, delivery calculators, user/customer management, newsletters module, multilingual capability, review/comment management, all pages to be search-engines optimised.

Project management decisions

Although being strong PMI methodology followers, this time we had to go Agile / Xtreme programming. The major constraints were time and fixed budget. The scope was set firm, so no worries here. Even without such constraints we would look into existing, off-the-shelf solutions to see what can be adopted ("make or buy" decision), but in this case it was probably the best and ony option. So, after few days of careful research and evaluation we identified a suitable script that would provide us with the most facilities and a least possible modifications. Next: quick deployment/configuration, payment system integration, graphic design decisions in parallel, with intermediate testing to prove the platform is operable, stable and works as expected.

Next, adjustments and customisations to design, templates and code, with content populating in parallel. By the end of week 3 we were able to start Beta testing with the Client. Even with usual "can you shift that picture 2 pixels down" we were confident that the project was on track. The last week proved that the careful selection of server platform, base script together with light-touch customisation paid-off with good performance and client satisfaction. And on the top of overall relief we were glad to see that the site was quickly indexed by Google, Bing and Yahoo. So here it is - webgastronom.com