Highlights

• More than 10,000 items online
• Highly SEO Optimized
  • SEO Friendly URLs
  • Main content delivered first in document order, navigation last
  • Extensive use of CSS sprites
  • All HTML, JavaScript, and CSS files minified and gzipped
• Fully automated integration with backend database, including roll-back capabilities
• Fully automated connection between products and their images
• Fully automated watermarking of images
• Custom store administration interface for new items

Description

Carolanfiestas.com is a “bricks to clicks” solution for Carolan, a party supply store in the Canary Islands. With more than 40,000 items in their inventory, Carolan needed a online store to expand their presence to other parts of Spain. Furthermore, they wanted to improve their ranging in the search engines and sell, sell, sell!

Technical

Carolanfiestas.com was a Zen Cart store with a custom theme and a few minor tweaks to improve search engine optimization. On the back end, the server would receive updates to articles in XML and update the Zen Cart database every few minutes with the changes. Likewise, whenever an item was sold, an XML file was sent to the backend database to keep inventory accurate. This site made extensive use of Bash scripts to move the data from XML to MySQL and to manage the creation of images with their watermarks (a minimum of 4 sizes per image). During the busy season, the site was very busy with more than 10,000 visits per day. You can read more about this project here (in Spanish).