Decorati

Website: Decorati

Client: Decorati

Dates: November 2006 through February 2007

Scope: 40 developer days

Description: Decorati.com focuses on high end interior design, serving the dual purpose of showcasing products to discriminating customers, and providing social networking between the designers themselves. Started in 2006 by author, entrepreneur, and interior designer Shane Reilly, Decorati.com has quickly become a market-leader on the web.

Chapter Three discovered Decorati in the Fall of 2006 through a mutual connection and quickly developed a working relationship. Although Decotari was not initially convinced as to using Drupal, Chapter Three was able to demonstrate the efficiency of developing on an open platform and the power of harnessing and extending existing contributed modules to build out site features. Drupal enabled us to quickly prototype and test the site, and complete the project in a much shorter period of time than would otherwise be possible.

The biggest challenge in this project was ensuring the visual design of the site was sufficiently elegant and enticing to impress an aesthetically-minded interior designers / design-consumer userbase. To this end, Chapter Three worked closely with Decorati’s design team to develop and implement a “casually elegant” design that would be both beautiful and usable, as well as integrate nicely with Drupal’s theme system.

Towards the close of the project Chapter Three successfully trained several members of the Decorati staff to administer and develop Drupal independently, with little to no ongoing assistance or support cost. This capacity-building allowed a successful “hand off” of the project, and empowered Decorati to internally manage their web-presence going forwad.

Features:

• Graphic Design: To meet expectations for a userbase of interior designers, Chapter Three worked closely with Decorati to develop an elegant and usable design that functioned well in all industry standard browsers.
• Designer Exchange: An intuitive submission process and photo-rich listing page allows interior designers to sell and buy beds, rugs, tables, upholstery, and other items.
• Registration and User System: Decotari.com supports multiple types of users, each with their own registration process, permissions, and site behavior.
• User Portfolios: Each user is provided with and encouraged to build out a photo-rich user portfolio including samples of their work and details about themselves. WYSIWYG editing capacity and privacy controls help to facilitate this process.
• Community: As experts in community site development, Chapter Three suggested and implemented several useful community functions — such as a multiple role invitation system and photographic user directory — that have helped designers find and connect with one another.
• Image Manipulation: Because of the image-intensive nature of the site, there “on the fly” image cropping and resizing algorithms are employed extensively, providing correctly formatted and sized images throughout the site.
• Capacity-Building and Training: Chapter Three assisted in the hiring and training of a site engineer to manage and execute further Drupal development. This capacity-building helped ensure a smooth client “hand-off” and let Decorati build out new features and functionality on their own.