Plural Helps H2O Clean Up Web Act

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H20 Plus' Lenhart (l.) turned to Plural's Brown to revamp Web site.

Brad Lenhart, director of e-business at H20 Plus, spoke to a neighbor that had been impressed by Plural's pitch for her company's business.

Lenhart was frustrated with the performance and limited capabilities of his company's Web site, which had been built in 1998 by C3, a now-defunct local solution provider. The old site "was horribly done," he said. "If you pulled it up, you wouldn't be able to see the products. It was really bad for the company's image."

While customers could place orders on the site, there were no direct links to product inventory, and orders had to be e-mailed to H20 Plus by C3, he said. Each night, the orders were manually entered into an application called BatchMaster, a product of eWorkplace Solutions, Laguna Hills, Calif.

The next iteration of Chicago-based H20 Plus' Web site, created in early 2000 by Web Design Group (now part of divine), looked better but choked during the year-end shopping season. While online sales had jumped 80 percent over the previous year, that progress was marred by "servers freezing up" in the critical early days of December, Lenhart said. He estimated that site downtime reduced online sales by as much as 25 percent.

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unit-1659132512259
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Sponsored post

ANATOMY OF A SOLUTION

>> COMPANY: Plural, New York.
>> FOCUS: Building and deploying e-business solutions with Microsoft products at their core>> 2001 REVENUE: $46 million
>> PROBLEMS and SOLUTION: H20 Plus wanted to improve the performance of its Web site and create links to inventory and distribution systems. Plural rebuilt the Web site and automated data entry.
>> PRODUCTS and SERVICES USED: Microsoft Visual InterDev, Commerce Server 2000, SQL Server 2000
>> LESSONS LEARNED:
• Make your pitches shine. Potential customers may talk you up to others.
• Pay close attention to clients' image and brand.
• Don't take a Band-Aid approach. You may have to recreate a Web site with new products and connections to legacy systems.

But the lack of reliability wasn't the site's only problem. H20 Plus' site "was written and architected in such a way that it was difficult to add new capabilities," said Alex Brown, general manager of Plural's Chicago office. There was no easy way to add blurbs about special sales and promotions, for example. Nor did the site match the hip vibe cultivated in H20 Plus' retail stores.

Brown said a five-person team from Plural, which has close ties to Microsoft, was assigned last summer to tackle the site's refurbishment. This group handled application and database development, testing and data analysis with Microsoft products such as Visual InterDev and Commerce Server 2000. Plural migrated H20 Plus' customer data to Microsoft SQL Server 2000 from an Oracle database, a move that Brown said offered performance gains.

Because of its relationship with Microsoft, Plural had access to the Microsoft Technology Center in Chicago. "There were a number of senior development people [from Microsoft that had worked on other Commerce Server deployments," Brown said. "[Microsoft's team and ours did the prototype for the H20 Plus site, and then we took it back into our shop." Unfettered access to the Microsoft developers gave Plural a shortcut to "a lot of tips and tricks" to get the maximum value from Commerce Server 2000, Brown said.

Lenhart said the Plural-built version of H20 Plus' site, which went live late last year, is hosted by Exodus. "We moved [our site over to Exodus in July," almost three months before the hosting giant filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection, he said. Despite lingering concerns about Exodus' long-term viability, Lenhart said he has been impressed with the company's straight talk and with the site uptime it has delivered.

Now Plural is doing a couple of other things to further enhance H2O Plus' solution: It is creating a mechanism that H20 Plus staff can use to check the site's performance and improving the processes by which orders from Canada are received, fulfilled and shipped, Lenhart said.