Case Study :: Melrob

Melrob is one of the UK's leading distributors of technical products and services within the chemical industry and have recently been placed in the Top 10 of the Sunday Times Virgin Atlantic Fast Track 100 - a league tracking Britain's 100 fastest growing companies.

Background

Prior to working with Web Management Studio, Melrob had previously used the services of a third-party web development company to build their corporate web site. Due to the complex, technical nature of their products and an ever increasing product portfolio, Melrob had found this approach increasingly expensive and time consuming. Melrob also found it difficult to achieve the immediacy of update that certain, particularly safety related, changes demanded.

The Requirement

In addition to presenting general information about their business, Melrob also wanted to provide sales and technical information regarding their chemical product portfolio. Providing a clean and logical navigation system, that would allow visitors to quickly find what they were looking for, was particularly challenging considering that the product set consisted of eleven major product groups, with each group consisting of up to five levels of sub-categorisation!

Melrob's specific Web Content Management System requirements can be broadly defined as follows:

  1. To avoid creating over complex navigation mechanisms, Melrob wanted to implement a 'context sensitive' menu system that would change and adapt to suit the active product selection
  2. A method for applying standardised layouts based upon the type of product being presented - for example, the information pertaining to a lubricant would be different to that of an adhesive
  3. The ability to easily assign and manage associated documentation to the general product information - for example, most products have an associated Technical Data Sheet in Adobe PDF format
  4. The capability to create language (e.g. Japanese) variants of the core web site
  5. A simple feature that would allow registered customers to login to the system and request product samples.

The Solution

Web Management Studio addressed all but the 'sample request' facility straight 'out of the box'.

Page Template Technology

Web Management Studio's Page Template technology was used to provide the framework for the context sensitive navigation and standardised layout. By developing a Page Template for each product group and, where necessary, product sub-groups, individual menu structures could be defined and assigned to each Page Template. It was then simply a case of creating the individual product pages and assigning them to their respective Page Templates.

File Download Manager

The files associated with the product documentation (e.g. Adobe PDF documents) were managed via the Web Management Studio Download Manager. In addition to simplifying the presentation of the download links, the Download Manager also creates a record of each download event in a log file, thus providing Melrob with the capability to analyse the files downloaded from their web site.

Multi-Language Support

The standard Web Management Studio installation can be configured to support any number of language/culture variants. Specific language presentation can then be adapted on a visitor by visitor basis.

Language selection can be set by:

  1. User preference (i.e. selecting a language option from a list of supported languages)
  2. 'Sensed' by querying the user's browser settings
  3. Set via the entry URLUniform Resource Locator.

For Melrob, the presented language was determined from the URLUniform Resource Locator; www.melrob.jp invokes the Japanese variant of the site, whilst www.melrob.com invokes the (default) United Kingdom version.

Membership Services and Embedded Controls

To provide the 'Sample Request' mechanism, a simple Embedded Control was developed to work with the standard Web Management Studio Membership Services security suite. Once logged in, the registered user can select product samples and add them to their 'Sample Drum', in a similar fashion to how items might be added to a shopping basket on a retail web site.

We previously used a third-party web design company to add/change content to our web site, but with the commercial and practical demand for ever more dynamic web content, the associated cost and turnaround time was simply unacceptable.

Web Management Studio allows us to quickly and easily update our web site as needed and represents a significant annual saving in our web marketing budget.

Marie Roberts - Melrob