Steely Eye Digital Media

About Multichannel Platform

Old-fashioned approaches to website development employ a separate management and maintenance system that may require heavy manual intervention and the repetition of tasks across several instances of the same site. We do not require content to be repurposed or specially curated for presentation on the mobile site: instead, the content is derived from the raw material used to build an existing web site.

Steely Eye Multichannel turns any existing single site web server into a future proof multichannel web server capable of supporting not only mobile devices, but also tablets, apps and emerging platforms such as Facebook apps and web-enabled TVs.

By taking this approach, no new content management workflows are required, and content edited for the www site automatically refreshes for the other channels such as mobile.

How Steely Eye Builds Better Websites Using the Multichannel platform

The Steely Eye Multichannel approach has the following additional benefits:

We exploit the existing SEO

• No one ever types in www.name.com on a mobile
• Visits are triggered by search, email newsletters and socially shared links
• Web links must be consistent – Page titles, meta keywords and content must also match
• Therefore it is essential that deep links match – E.g. www.site.com/range/product MUST map to m.site.com/range/product on a mobile site
• Ideally the entire URL stays the same including www – But this may not always be possible, in which case m..com is desirable

We keep the existing workflow

• Customers expect the same content, the same service, the same products, prices and offers across all channels
• In any case, maintaining separate sets of content and catalogues would be inefficient and costly
• By keeping the existing author/edit/merchandising workflows we avoid the need to retrain your staff
• We provide maximum design flexibility
• By properly separating content and presentation we allow complete freedom in site design
• Our design team produces on-brand, compelling, clear and fun to use sites (Or your existing in house team or agency can produce templates using industry standard template markup)
• That includes taking advantage of the latest HTML5 and JavaScript powered features
• With Steely Eye, your site looks like your site, not like your competitors’ sites
• If your legacy site is stuck on IE6 and Flash, we can even free up the content to make new templates for modern browsers

We use fluid design and responsive CSS

• Fluid designs avoid fixed size elements, leaving designs that flow to fill the container they find themselves in
• Responsive design means making a template design that is not only fluid, but changes the layouts, sizes and user experience to the most optimum design for the form factor
• It is implemented using media queries, which is mostly a new feature of CSS3
• It can however be hard to support all channels and older devices with one responsive template (Often multiple template sets are still required)

We are future proof

• A Steely Eye mobile website is a future proof website

Once we have integrated the Multichannel platform with a site, the only work necessary to support new channels is to update template sets

The Multichannel platform can be added on to any existing CMS or eCommerce platform driven website.

At the front end, its page assembly layer uses context analysis of the incoming requests to choose the most appropriate template for the device type and other contextual information such as language and country of origin, and selects from one or more templates to offer mobile optimised user experiences and specific templates for featurephones, tablets, legacy desktop browsers, web TV and more.

At the back end, the platform contains a plugin framework which means that the code required to integrate with existing content management systems is very small, and that any legacy system can be supported by the method most appropriate for that system.

All existing content editing and authoring or catalogue management is retained, meaning that no retraining and no content migration is required.

It is even possible, but not recommended, to use transcoding (or ‘scraping’) as a plugin methodology if speed of implementation is the most desired attribute ahead of value or reliability.

As a result, the Multichannel platform server application can also be hosted anywhere the client wishes, on their own hosting infrastructure internal or external, or as a managed service from Steely Eye.

The Multichannel platform takes an existing www site, and makes it possible to optimise the user experience for new channels and form factors of device, thus ensuring conversion stay consistent.