Rocketry Planet’s review of Sunward’s site now available on the wayback machine, listed below:
Website Review: Sunward using new software to help users
A combination of a popular open-source content management system, a powerful shopping cart extension and a dedicated server gives this company great results with room to grow
Website Review by Darrell D. Mobley
Monday, November 22, 2010
Angelo Castellano, the owner of Sunward Aerospace Group Limited, got involved with rocketry after his children saw the movie October Sky and wanted to launch some model rockets. From there, their rocketry hobby turned into Castellano’s purchase of Sunward after looking for products to sell for his eBay account.
After purchasing the company from the founders in 2004, Castellano grew the product line from around 15 items then to what is offered today, and expanded the company’s offering to include siege engine wood kits, a paper telescope, and custom-made CNC balsa parts. Sunward products are currently available in many countries around the world and Sunward continues to expand their availability.
Since 2000, Sunward has had a website presence to showcase the company’s line of products and to provide information and support to visitors. Today, with new ownership and management, the website now handles over 240 items for sale direct to the consumer, and using new software, the site also acts as a knowledgebase for rocketeers.
Initially, the code for the site was written with the help of Macromedia (now Adobe) Dreamweaver and Microsoft FrontPage. Although the site worked well, it was limited in what could be accomplished by visitors. The site has gone through many changes in style and size over the years, with the last major change coming in 2008 by Mike Vandre, who redid the CSS (Cascading Style Sheets) and improved the look and feel of the site.
The use of these proprietary development tools also made it difficult to implement new changes and provided what is considered to be a ‘static’ site. As the site grew, these limitations became more evident to the new owner. Castellano commented that at times, “the drop down menu stopped working when there were upgrades to the browsers being used” by site visitors, a situation that even caused the colors of the menu to change for no reason.
As a result of these problems, and the need to increase the power of the site, a decision was made in 2009 to implement a new Content Management System (CMS) to provide a more friendly and powerful user experience.
After a 10 month search and learning period, the Sunward website was recreated based on the Drupal CMS software together with a Ubercart shopping cart extension. Drupal/Ubercart is a widely popular, powerful, and open source CMS/shopping cart combination, and the change-over was made at the beginning of April of 2010—a decision shared by the entire staff at Sunward, each of who were involved in the software search and decision-making process.
Castellano explained the change took more time than expected and that, “about 400 man-hours have been used to implement the change-over when you look at the time for learning the software and the time used to implement it. It was overwhelming at times.” Local user groups were also attended during the redevelopment process and while they provided a lot of help, they comsumed entire evenings at least once a month.
Now with the new software implemented, its features can be used for the benefit of visiting users. Visitors now have access to a built-in Search function. Purchases can be made without having to set up individual new user accounts. Related products are shown so a visitor doesn’t have to make separate purchases, and shipping quotes are now built into the site and can be individually customized.
Castellano has indicated the site will continue to grow, since it is also used for the storage of information about users of Sunward products, so more resources will be added on a continual basis. The Drupal CMS system has a built in “taxonomy” system which allows for the easy tagging of all content and blog entries, and as a result, according to Castellano, “browsing the site has never been easier.”
Soon to be added will be support for mailing in money orders, and local buyers to the company will be able to select ‘local pickup’ at no additional expense.
Currently the Sunward site only handles shipments headed for the U.S. and Canada, although Castellano stated this is will change soon. A shipping module under development will allow the addition of more countries. One of the biggest problems Castellano faced with the previous site was that buyers based in other countries had to email and ask for a shipping quote. With the new custom software, the quote will be calculated in real-time. And for all countries, there will even be options for express services for those customers who need their products in a rush.
Model rocket motors have recently been added to the site, shipped via FAST Courier. High power motors were planned to be sold, but shipping was impractical from Sunward’s Canadian location. The new courier software allows for HAZMAT fees to be included where required without additional input from the purchaser.
Castellano stated, “The goal of the software is for the quotes to be real time and accurate for 99.9% of purchases. Unless the buyer is a remote or unique location, there should be no reason for someone at Sunward to call and ask for additional funds after the purchase. Some online vendors currently do this and I view that as unacceptable except for unusual circumstances.”
Security was also a top priority for the new CMS. According to Andrea, an employee at Sunward, “We looked at Joomla, but we kept seeing problems with sites getting hacked,” and as a result he stated that Joomla was dropped from the list of potential candidates.” Drupal currently has a strong emphasis on security, which was a major reason in choosing it during the final decision. In addition to the strength of Drupal, strong passwords are used and are not on any computer system that may be attacked.
In addition to speed and security, the dedicated server also allows for basic “root” access, which gives Sunward the ability to control the computing environment better. With the use of a second hard-drive, the entire site has an regular backup done automatically, not visible to the users. In addition, the software and the database are backed up frequently to a Sunward computer system and stored off-site.
For even more security, a hardware firewall is also used, providing an extra barrier to potential threats. A feature of Drupal on a dedicated server is the logging of potential threats. Should a threat be seen coming from a specific IP address, the address can be blocked at the software level within Drupal or even at the firewall level, if needed.
With the current fears potential customers have that their credit card information will be stolen when shopping online, the new site provides addition security. Credit card information is not be stored on the site nor does anyone at Sundward have have access to it. Payment processing is still done through PayPal, and only PayPal has access to any credit card information. Castellano indicated if another payment processor is added, only those supported by Drupal would be considered, allowing for oversight of the security risks by the Drupal community worldwide.
Sunward’s owner and employees are pleased with the final result and the potential for the future. The new Drupal CMS provides for better interaction for the site’s users and customers, and the dedicated server increases the site’s speed while allowing for fine tuning of any content served.
Castellano felt future growth will be easier as new products, services, and resources are added to the site, leaving him confident “users will be well served and protected in the future.”
Website: https://www.sunward1.com