CASE STUDY
Taking Sealy to the Next Level
Sealy Posturepedic® started in 1881, in a small Texas town called Sealy. Daniel Haynes was an inventor who found a better way of baling cotton into mattresses. His new mattress quickly became very popular. Sealy Posturepedic® Australia have been around for over 100 years and are the leading mattress company in Australia and now reach far into Korea, China and many other Asian countries.
Sealyspirit.com and Sealytraining.com evolved over many years to become a part of Sealy’s business culture and support for their retail outlets.
*Due to the data being private and internal only we are limited by what screenshots we can show.
Sealy Spirit
Sealyspirit.com provides events, news and historical articles for employees.
Features:
- Infinite scroll blog rolls
- 7,000+ employee listings
- Ability to switch languages
- First login video training popup
- Custom first login / password reset template
- Multiple search filtering for post types
- Newsletter subscription and custom mail-outs
Challenges:
Being one of BFJ Media’s first large scale projects and being under time limitations we made mistakes with briefing not being thorough enough, a mistake we would later improve upon greatly.
We also needed to translate a very old site and database system with a ton of data across to WordPress / mySQL. The migration process required custom scripting to capture all data and make the import into WordPress. After several attempts and many tweaks we had all the data ready for development.
Over the years the site was developed to provide a smoother user experience with new articles relating to people, news, history and more. We also provided options for multiple languages to support employees across Australia and Asia.
A Great Experience & Some Big Lessons
The Sealy Spirit project was a huge lesson in IT business management for Cloudology.
The biggest lesson we learnt was not to allow a client to push for faster production when large scale briefs have not been properly scoped. Additional funds to finish faster by adding people is nowhere as efficient as a small team that already know their own code and have a thorough brief in hand.
Think twice, code once became our motto and all turned out well.
Aaron Pratt – Project Manager
Sealy Training
Sealytraining.com provides invaluable training for their retail outlets.
Features:
- Suggested Video based on previous watch
- Video rating from Adobe Captivate & mp3s
- Award badges for different actions completed
- Statistical breakdown for country regions, brands and stores
- 7 User level permissions for different access scenarios
- WordPress mutli-site logins for different countries
- Notification system for managers to send to their groups
Challenges:
The big decision to make on this project was whether Sealy Training should be built with the flexibility of using the Laravel PHP Framework or whether we stick with WordPress and over come it’s limitations.
We decided to go with WordPress so the staff at Dolphin Creative would be able to content manage the site using the same interface they were used to using with Sealy Spirit.
Getting WordPress to run a large scale custom coded Learning Management System had limitations that we faced due to WordPress not being ideal, and, using a LMS plugin was not going to provide what was needed.. The final result was a custom made LMS WordPress Multi-site that could handle multiple countries.
“Measure twice, cut once” is a wise saying.
For us, it became..
Think twice, code once !