Digitron | Inventory and content management system in Kentico MVC

Project goals

The purpose of the project was to refresh the site look and make it modern as well as add responsiveness to target mobile users, fix existing issues as well as improve user and editors experience and site performance

Result

Site traffic increased for 136% compared to the same period of previous year

About the client

Established in 1977, Digitron Semiconductors is a broad-line, high mix/low volume supplier of high-reliability discrete products to military, aerospace, industrial, and commercial markets. Digitron semiconductor devices protect circuits, amplify and condition signals, produce, distribute, convert and regulate power. Digitron specializes in delivering high reliability Zener diodes, transient voltage suppressors, rectifiers and transistors, designed to meet unique customer requirements as they pertain to physical, electrical, test, screening and/or operating conditions. Products are produced to meet commercial, industrial and military quality standards.

Project goals

Client was looking for solving one of the biggest problems of the old site - inability to extend inventory with new product types without quite massive development efforts. Additionally, businesses wanted to make the site look modern and target any possible screen factor providing their users with an awesome experience despite the device they are using. Old site somewhat lacked performance and had minor issues here and there, which impacted users' experience. In terms of user experience the goal was to enable site visitors to find what they are looking for in five clicks. Also validation for page types was not configured correctly and caused site crashes if the editor entered invalid value.Consequently the goal was to fix mentioned issues to lower bounce rate and save editors time and improve users' journey for both.

Key challenge

One of the biggest challenges of the project was implementing dynamic product families that would allow clients to manage fields, their appearance on the site with appropriate units and abbreviations, manage filter options and finally add and configure new product types. All of the above required us to invent a simple in use mechanism that would allow clients to change the appearance of product related pages without code interaction, but configured through Kentico admin UI. Being data heavy application site performance was another challenge we had to solve. And last but not least was quite tricky search that would search not products only, but related products according to certain algorithms.

Our solutions

For the dynamic product types we've built Kentico Custom Modules to provide product type editing capabilities: here site editors are able to create or edit product types, add or remove fields, specify what fields are used for filtering on a public page, specify field units, fields' visibility and order in the products listing grid. Another section of the module provides editing capabilities for product data with convenient search and navigation options. On another side of things we had to implement dynamic page templates that would present data according to products' custom module configuration, build filters and product listing grid on the fly vs being hard coded in page templates and transformation. Moving thousands of products from the content tree also allowed us to improve performance and comply with Kentico best practice. Unfortunately that was not enough for requested site performance and we had to apply best optimization practice in terms of content optimization and Kentico configuration by disabling unnecessary processing and heavy usage of caching wherever it was possible. Regarding search we had to customize default indexing algorithms and add custom content there in order to link related parts and search results ensure relevance level. Additionally we had to parse PDF documentation and use particular pieces of it as a custom search index content.
Features: content management, product catalog, extremely flexible inventory management, product list and details appearance management, excel data import, search

Result

Site traffic increased for 136% compared to the same period of previous year. Taking into account the current situation with lock-down because of CoVid-19 this is a really impressive increase and we expect even more when business gets back to normal.