Sector(s)
Team Members
Project Team
Josh Fischer - Project Manager - Artsmith Media LLC
Andrey Mikheychick - Lead Developer - Artsmith Media LLC
Jay Perry - Art Director - Jay Perry Works
Visit the site
Visit the siteOrganizations Involved
Community contributions
Several patches were contributed to the modules we were using.
Additionally we used the experience of this project to develop a new Drupal distribution. We found that many of the features that this client (and others) have requested are very similar. We are working to build a distribution that offers a fast and easy solution to each of those request. For example, photo galleries, video galleries, homepage carousels, testimonials, news articles, etc. These are all content types that each client asked for.
We are working to build each of these as features, load them into a distribution, then release that distribution to the community. This approach will help save tech teams much time so that they can focus on more detailed and custom tasks.
If you want to learn more about our distro, let us know - http://www.artsmithmedia.com/ourdistro
Sympathy Food is a web-based service that prepares and delivers homestyle meals to friends and loved ones when they are in times of need. The website highlights 24 meal package items that can be purchased for friends or loved ones. Once the package is purchased, Sympathy Food will contact the recipient to schedule a delivery time that fits their needs, then will deliver the package.
It was our goal to make the site as fast and easy to use and to automate as many features as possible. Currently, the system automates every part of the workflow other than calling the recipient and scheduling a delivery, and the physical process of packaging and shipping. The system is integrated with the computer system at the distribution warehouse and their email marketing software which allows information to flow amongst the areas of the business without any manual involvement.
About the project
Sympathy Food is a web-based service that prepares and delivers homestyle meals to friends and loved ones when they are in times of need. For instance, if I live in Virginia and my college roommate lives in California and I find out that he just lost his grandmother, I can use SympathyFood.com to send him a Sympathy Meal. SympathyFood.com highlights 24 meal package items that can be purchased for friends or loved ones. Once the package is purchased, Sympathy Food will contact the recipient to schedule a delivery time that fits their needs, then will deliver the package.
It was our goal to make the site as fast and easy to use and to automate as many features as possible. Currently, the system automates every point of the work flow other than calling the recipient and scheduling a delivery, and the physical process of packaging and shipping.
We chose Drupal for this project because of its flexiblity and because we were confident that the client would feel comfortable maintaining the site in the future. Additionally, the client wanted to build SympathyFood.com and in the future develop other platforms for different life occasions. We were confident that Drupal could meet their initial needs and scale with their business as it grew.
The distribution warehouse that actually delivered the food has a custom API for pushing data into their system. It was important for the client that when an order is created, it could be easily pushed to the distribution warehouse so that orders would ship on time and arrive when expected. Our developers used the distribution warehouses API to package the purchase data and upload that information on the distribution warehouse system seamlessly.
Additionally, we worked with the distribution warehouse to include additional commands in the API so that customers would know when an order was shipped. Once the distribution warehouse marked a product as “shipped” on their system, our system would use web services to collect that information and prepare and deliver an email to the customer. These features are all processed automatically.
In addition to the automation of the web system, it was important that the entire system was intuitive and very easy to maintain by Sympathy Food staff. Within hours of going live, staff were maintaining the system on their own. Artsmith Media produced a 20-page reference manual on how to maintain content on the site, manage orders, and set delivery dates, review reports, etc. The client was very impressed with how easy it is to maintain.
Additionally, SympathyFood.com hired an SEO firm to help boost their results on search engines. We implemented several SEO modules including Page Title, SEO Friend, Google Webmaster Tools, and Google Analytics. The SEO firm also talked about how easy the system was to manage and found that the SEO results were superior to other CMS systems.
As mentioned before, from the beginning of this project, the plan was to build the SympathyFood.com site and make it successful, then to replicate that idea into a variety of other product channels under the umbrella company The T.L.C. Kitchen. We recently did just that. Once the website was optimized and was in a format that led to great conversions, our team worked with the SympathyFood.com team to build TheMealStork.com , GetWellMeal.com and TheTLCKitchen.com.
The other two sites (The Meal Stork and Get Well Meal) are part of a Drupal multi-site configuration. We are using one Drupal core to support all three sites. Each site has its own database, theme, and site files.
We were able to simply duplicate the database and site files to start building the additional sites. Our creative team produced unique designs and color palettes for the other sites and we applied those adjustments through CSS and other site files.
Implementing the two additional sites (including planning, design, and development) required ⅓ of the effort of building SympathyFood.com. We are in a position now that we can prepare and launch additional “products” in a fraction of the time and at a fraction of the cost.
Since going live with all three products, and realizing a dramatic increase in revenue The TLC Kitchen has been approached by many national competitors with interest in acquisition and capital investment.
Artsmith Media continues to work with The TLC Kitchen to optimize conversions. Since all three sites have gone live we have implemented several additional features. One feature is a live chat solution that allows the staff to talk directly with customers as they browse the site.
You can see all three sites at:
www.sympathyfood.com
www.themealstork.com
www.getwellmeal.com
Why Drupal was chosen
Sympathy Food is an e-commerce website that provides a service that allows users to purchase meal gifts and have them delivered to loved ones after they've lost someone. Each meal is prepared in a gourmet kitchen, packaged, frozen and shipped in a freezer box. In addition to providing this service for sympathy gifts, the client has plans to expand this concept to other life occasions including births (The Meal Stork) and during times of illness (Get Well Meal).
Several aspects of this project influenced the decision to use Drupal.
- Primarily, we needed to use an open-source platform that had e-commerce capabilities.
- We needed the platform to be flexible enough that we could customize not only the website, but the shopping cart experience.
- We needed a platform that was very SEO-friendly, and offered the ability for the client to easily manage and maintain the SEO information.
- The client required the ability to add, edit, maintain and remove products, and product information.
- Additionally, this business was a startup, and the founders were focused on optimizing the conversions in a LEAN manner. We needed a system that would allow us to continue to optimize the layout of the interface, test out new features and make tweaks to maximize the user experience.
- Finally, we had to use a system that could connect to the distribution warehouse's custom API to deliver purchase order information seamlessly.
We knew that Drupal would provide a robust platform that could handle the e-commerce component, but could also be customizable and allow us to continue testing changes to build the business.
Technical Specifications
Key modules/theme/distribution used:
Our team has found that by building custom content types and developing Views, we can build systems that are extremely easy for our clients to maintain and edit on their own. This is so important to our team and our clients.
This collection of modules seemed to be the perfect cocktail for this project. We decided to use Drupal 6 and Ubercart at the time because there was still a lot of work that needed to be done to Drupal 7 and the new Commerce module. Importantly, we were concerned about the time needed to contribute to Drupal while maintaining the schedule for this project.
Moving forward, however, we have decided that we will likely use D7 with Commerce and contribute to making both Drupal and Commerce better for everyone.
