Our Work: Custom Website & Content Management

CUI Website And CMS

CUI, Inc., an electronic component manufacturer, originally hired Resource Data to maintain their website—a heavily customized site built on a platform designed for a different industry.

The site was difficult to maintain: 30-minute tasks were taking 50-100 hours. It became clear a new system was required to meet their growing demands.

The Solution

Working jointly with CUI, we replaced their website and related components. The new site includes

  • A custom content management system (CMS)
  • A database that supports CUI’s complex data
  • A website that builds pages dynamically from the CMS

With millions of possible CUI product configurations, one challenge was making it simple to find products. Therefore, we developed an advanced “parametric” search for filtering products by a range of specifications.

To bring customers to the site, we helped optimize it for search engines: it’s now high in search rankings and in the first two months, visitors increased 65%.

And CUI staff can update the site in minutes instead of hours.

Our Role

This project was a joint effort, with team members from CUI and Resource Data. CUI team members focused on the graphic design and styling; we addressed technical aspects, such as

  • Designing the database
  • Cleansing and migrating legacy data
  • Developing the CMS

Our Approach

Our first task was redesigning the database, which needed to support CUI’s complex set of possible part configurations. We then loaded data into the new optimized structure, translating 8,000 existing records into millions of records.

In addition, because no commercial CMS would meet CUI’s needs, we built a custom one that enables CUI to maintain products and static pages.

To reduce interdependencies between CUI’s work and our work, we selected an MVC architecture. This choice allowed both tracks to proceed independently, which was critical with the project’s aggressive schedule.

Even so, we talked with CUI team members on a daily basis. This communication enabled the team to respond quickly to changes, stay coordinated, and help each other.