BEI

A start up in the part manufacturing industry, BEI chose 420 Design to create a logo and a customer-centric website to gain a competitive edge in their industry.

Our work with BEI started with the logo – it set the foundation for the entire company and site. Several revisions and minor tweaks later, we came up with what you see on their site... a modern, typographic logo.

The site itself was a whole other beast that took nearly a year to fully develop and test thoroughly. At first glance it looks like a simple site, but dig deeper and inner-workings are somewhat revealed. We built the entire site from the ground up, which included not only the public front-end but the customer account area and site administrator back-end.

The customer account area allows each customer to upload their CAD drawings to the site and get a quote back from BEI. Upon approval of the quote, account update emails are sent out to the customer at each phase of production, including shipping notifications with a link to track the shipment. Each customer can also view and edit their account details and view their account history, which includes past orders and files they've uploaded. The ordering portion of the system uses industry standard security measures including an SSL certificate, merchant account and payment gateway. Emails are custom HTML emails and the core of the site is handled by an administrative back-end used by BEI staff.

BEI's website back-end allows BEI staff to see each customer's order at any stage of the ordering process. That includes updating an order's status using simple form-based controls.

Due to the complexity of the site logistically, there were several test phases throughout the project. The initial tests were the usual browser tests to ensure that the site runs and displays the same on major browsers (including Internet Explorer, Firefox and Safari). Subsequent tests focused on logic flow, usability and debugging. BEI also ran a semi-private beta period for about 2 months with a select number of customers for further usability testing and debugging.

The final site went live in early December 2007.

• Logo design
• Identity style guide
• Site architecture
• Website creative direction, design, layout
• Website development (XHTML / CSS)
• PHP/MySQL programming/development
• Search engine optimization

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