From Rooftop to the Cloud & Back Again
Mule-Hide Products Co. Delivers a High-Performance Responsive Website Focused on UX
Front & Backend Development
.NET Core - DNN - Azure
Fast, easy access to the latest [documentation] versions is critical to our success.
— Cory Ertmer:
Mule-Hide Products
Mission: Deliver Responsive Product Information Fast
Mule-Hide Products Co. is a leading supplier of roofing products for commercial buildings. If a job site is waiting on products or specs, it cost thousands of dollars in idle time. The material supplier that responds fastest wins. But the current site was hard to use and getting bogged down and was virtually impossible to use well on mobile devices.
They needed a new website solution that not only delivered all the product information, but it had to be easy to keep updated, look great on phones, and have blazing-fast and intuitive search.
Strategic Objectives
- Make product information immediately available to customers in the field on mobile devices
- Help contractors, architects, and engineers find product distributors based on location
- Make product searches simple, fast, and intuitive based upon searching behavior and need, and covering > 3,000 SKUs.
- Ensure that the new solution is built to scale with the company’s expanding inventory and distribution plans
Tactical Objectives
- Identify a technology development partner with the skills and experience to implement the strategy
- Migrate product documentation from file-based storage to database storage and retrieval
- Design a new website to create an improved, responsive, & modern user experience consistent with existing brand
- Identify & deploy to a proven public cloud infrastructure that scales economically with projected growth
Choosing the Right Technology Stack
IowaComputerGurus (ICG) came highly recommended. It was more than just their extensive experience building scalable and secure business websites and software solutions. ICG proved adept at working with corporate teams to create consensus by being sensitive to the business needs of individual stakeholders.
Due to mission requirements, ICG recommended the DNN CMS on the front end and a custom .NET Core backend application, yielding speed and easy management. The entire solution would sit on Microsoft's Azure Cloud for low latency and geo-graphic redundancy.
"[They] worked really well with every department at Mule-Hide and with our corporate office to achieve enthusiastic buy-in by delivering on their needs while providing direct answers, options, costs, and benefits.”
-- Cory Ertmer: Mule-Hide Products
Implementation & Project Completion
The new Mule-Hide website solution went live in November 2017 and has received extremely positive reviews. From beginning to end, the project took less than five months — including presentations at the corporate office to properly scope out the requirements of every stakeholder.
The project went live smoothly with zero downtime, followed by extensive testing to ensure performance goals were met. Even post-launch, the ICG team came on-site to train the Mule-Hide team, provide project documentation, and personally assist with final questions and needs.
.NET Core, Azure, & DNN Experience Crucial
As a recognized expert on the DNN Platform, ICG knew that it would provide a scalable, secure, and responsive platform for the public-facing website. And as one of the first production development shops to deploy .NET Core projects, they had confidence that the performance gains would meet or exceed expectations.
But great websites need to be hosted on an infrastructure that is equally scalable and robust. As a Microsoft certified Cloud Solutions Provider (CSP), ICG had the insight and access to design the right cloud solution to deliver results.
Result - Mission Accomplished
3,000
Product Pages Created
3x
Increase in Mobile Traffic
+21%
Increased in User Engagement
5x
Organic SEO Pages Indexed
0
Downtime
100%
Reduction in Infrastructure Capital Costs
The project has been a huge success by every measurement. The new mobile-first design coupled with the exceptional performance improvements of the .NET Core backend have drastically increase mobile access and user engagement across the site. The website is continually enhanced at a pace of 1 major release per quarter.