The Steely Eye digital Multichannel Platform enables mobile, tablet, Facebook, connected TV and apps channels to be driven from your existing production workflows.
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.
The full list of form factors supported out of the box includes:
Smartphone including iPhone, Android, BlackBerry, Symbian, Windows Phone 7 and Bada
Tablets including large (iPad) and small (Kindle Fire, Galaxy Note) form factors
Feature phones supporting WAP2/XHTML-MP
Mobile apps on all platforms, built using RESTful web services
TV optimised websites (compatible with Samsung Smart TV, LG Smart TV, Panasonic, Sony, YouView, PlayStation 3 and more)
TV apps on all platforms, built using RESTful web services
Facebook apps
eBook readers (for passive content only)
Infotainment displays and kiosks including smart home appliances
Modern desktop web browsers
Legacy desktop web browsers
Virtual and Augmented Reality, built using RESTful web services
Content Management System integration
Multichannel integrates with your existing content management system. No new workflows are required and when a change is made on your existing www site, the change is immediately reflected on your Multichannel-powered sites.
Out of the box Multichannel includes support for the following Content Management Systems:
Adobe CQ5
SiteCore
Magnolia
WordPress
Hippo
Jahia
Abacus WebVision
Most Java Content Respository standard compliant CMS
Most XML-RPC compliant CMS
Payments
Multichannel supports integration of all your existing payment options including out of the box:
Paypal
DataCash
WorldPay
SagePay
Payment Card Industry compliance checklists may be required depending on the implementation (www transcoding and third party payment sites options do not require any checks) of the integration. Multichannel itself never stores any customer payment details.
Hospitality
Previous integrations with hotel and hospitality sector booking systems means that out of the box, Multichannel is ready to integrate with the following restaurant and hotel booking systems:
Micros Opera
Probookers
Torex
Clarity
Competing booking systems can be added as required.
Analytics
Multichannel supports all major analytics providers and site analytics can be integrated with your existing solution to ensure all the data is one place. Analytics support out of the box includes, but is not limited to:
Omniture
Google Analytics
WebTrends
TagMan
Hosting Requirements
The Multichannel server application requires a Java Enterprise environment such as Apache Tomcat or JBoss.