For those of our friends who missed it, eZ Systems declared the recently launched DC Shoes project, build by Aplyca as site of the month for November 2011.
DC Shoes Global (dcshoes.com) is owned by Quiksilver, a New York Stock Exchange listed company offering a variety of branded outdoor apparel. DC Shoes was looking to consolidate content and functionality within a multi-country and multilingual site that offers information and ecommerce for brands such as Quiksilver, DC Shoes and Roxy.
Aplyca worked with DC Shoes as the expert technical lead in their site’s move to eZ Publish CMS. The project involved integrating social media, providing independence for international sites while maintaining a unified and engaging customer experience. Gary Penn, Interactive Director at DC Shoes, Quiksilver and Roxy, afirmed that “Aplyca is a true star.” He added, “We have pared nearly 25 percent from our site homepage load time with no errors/glitches. Our images are larger; we have more promos and yet we've reduced time to load - that's nothing short of spectacular.”
The visual and UX portions of the new site were done by Terralever, an Arizona/Los Angeles based agency. In addition to the eZ Systems site of the month, the DC Shoes site was awarded the CommArts pick of the week award soon after being launched. CommArts is a renowned publication for visual design.
This is the fourth time that the an Aplyca customer has gained this recognition from eZ Publish, who selects each month’s winner from a host of sites around the world. According to Felipe Jaramillo, CEO of Aplyca, “The entire Aplyca team is passionate about ensuring our customers’ success and this award is a testament to the entire team’s experience, dedication and knowledge of how to execute on this objective.”
Some of the challenges that were overcome were the need to make sharing content between different countries much easier while establishing a polished workflow approval process using eZ Publish, integrating social media and enabling ecommerce integration throughout the site among other improvements. Performance enhancements were aided by the adoption of cloud computing in the back-end running on a a multitude of Amazon Web Services technologies.
The ultimate recognition is indeed the business result from an effort like this. In the end, the engineering prowess and experience that Aplyca applies to each project is driven by this objective. Nevertheless, the site has continued to garner additional recognition from the industry as evidenced by Communication Arts’ recent inclusion of the DC Shoes site within its “webpicks” section.
