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http://www.bi-lo.com

Give us some background on some of the members of your team and the company that you work for.

We’re a little different. But in a good way. We’re a high-performing, eclectic team of creatives and marketing strategists. Our unique approach is shaped by years of experience in customer engagement, branding and marketing, user experience, design and technical development. We are passionate about solving our clients’ business problems through strategy, innovation and creativity. We are also committed to excellence and never stop learning and developing new skills. We may be small, but we are mighty. Our clients benefit from deep personal relationships, high-touch service and a bag of tricks crammed with proven strategies for building your business.

Tell us about the site. What vision were you trying to fill for the client?

BI-LO is a regional grocery store chain with over 200 stores in the Carolinas, Georgia, and Tennessee. They have recently begun a multi-million dollar effort to redesign their stores, providing a more open, warmer store design that emphasizes freshness and savings. With their new website and its focus on usability, accessibility, and content, BI-LO is positioning itself to be an industry leader in overall web experience. With a color palette and layout that stresses freshness and cleanliness, as well as its own emphasis on savings and the user, the web site is focused on making visitors feel like they are walking into one of the newly renovated stores.

Was there a specific reason why EE was chosen for this project? Why?

We have been using EE as our primary CMS of choice for over two years, so the easy (and smug) answer would be “because that’s how we roll”‚ but in all seriousness, it fit the needs of the project very nicely. The client was phasing out an enterprise-level content management system that carried with it an exorbitant annual maintenance fee so the need for new software had already been established. Ease of use, performance, and scalability were all required attributes of whatever system we implemented and Expression Engine satisfied all of those. There were a number of unique types of content on the site, such as news posts, pages, articles with archives, events, stores and more, so a system that was flexible enough to easily be able to handle data in a variety of ways was paramount. In addition, because of the amount of custom programming that was required, being able to leverage the CodeIgniter framework was a very nice cherry on top.

What add-ons were used? and why?

Pixel & Tonic’s add-ons (Wygwam, Playa, and Matrix) are ones we use on every EE build - Matrix is hands down the most useful add-on for EE out there. Phil Sturgeon’s REST module was a very useful tool as we interfaced heavily with a custom RESTful API throughout the site. Because user authentication was handled through an existing CA Siteminder database, we needed to make external calls to pull a logged in user’s fuelperks! and year to date savings. The entire weekly ads section is populated by external data - each of BI-LO’s 200+ stores has a different weekly ad that changes weekly - so every action in that area relies on API calls. The API was written by the amazing internal IT team at BI-LO. Other add-ons included the Solspace Calendar module that powers the local events calendar and SuperSearch module. BetterMeta rounds out the major add-ons used on the site.

What difficulties did you encounter? How did you address them? Was there a particular add-on that got you out of a bind?

The server environment and security protocols required definitely presented some challenges on this site as did the overall scope of the project. Sitting behind a reverse proxy and running on load-balanced servers, there were initial concerns whether Expression Engine could reside within that environment. After consulting with several leading members of the community, the BI-LO team built a server infrastructure that can easily handle the traffic they receive on a daily basis. The shear size of the site presented a challenge in how we could simply deal with the amount of code involved. With such a large team, version control and communication was a must.

Other Add-ons

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