Populate

A fully featured e-commerce and content management system with advanced product inventory functionality.

Key features

• Multi lingual
• Multi currency
• Stock control
• International, zonal shipping

I led a small team of developers who built front end templates for customer sites while I concentrated on the admin and developing tools.

The platform was originally conceived when there was less competition, despite being feature rich and comparing well with its competition in terms of features and usability, in recent years it has become increasingly difficult to win new business.

The project is a traditional LAMP stack, not based on any framework but has a lot of similarities with Laravel/Symfony.

The data structure from the admin is very versatile and robust and we have used this to populate data sets which we have then supplied into apps and third party websites either via our API or with front  ends powered by Laravel, Symfony or React.

Populate demo store

This is a demo store that shows off all of the features of the Populate CMS. I put this together as none of the front end stores are running all of the features:

• Multi currency
• Multi lingual
• Full internal checkout with multiple payment methods
• International shipping
• Stock control
• Booking calendars
• Product locations

Godalming College

This project uses the Populate platform with a custom module built to handle the application process. It's a multi stage application and the client can change the questions as they want in each stage of the application. 

This project was designed and commisioned by Room11 Design.

Accipi

This is a survey builder platform to allow research students to create surveys. Its unique selling point was to allow lecturers to have control over the content, so that they could approve the questions before publishing and to have visibility of the results during and after the survey period. It also kept tight control of GDPR sensitive data from the participants. A reward process for people completing the surveys where they can gain points that could be exchanged for vouchers is also in place.

This project was commissioned and designed by Room 11 Design.

Golden Moments

This site has been constantly evolving since I first worked on this project 16 years ago. The client continuously comes back for upgrades both to the front end user experience and to the administration system.

The industry is very competitive and margins are extremely tight so managing the SEO to maximise natural listings traffic and keeping all of the costs down, from infrastructure costs to the number of staff required to manage the fulfilment process has been a priority.

The routines that power the pricing of products is fully custom in order to deal with the complexity of purchasing the experiences in one country, paying tax in another and delivering in a third country.

This is not a Populate project. Populate was partly created in answer to a lot of the shortcomings of this project which started life as an off-the-shelf e-commerce platform.

This site has gone through various visual treatments over the years. I designed and built this look back in 2015, it has been tweaked over the years with a minor face lift last year.

Promotions Interactive

I worked for Promotions interactive for 8 years in which time we delivered literally hundreds of on-pack and Point of sale promotions. I have vast experience of text-to-win, unique entry codes and promotional websites.

I stopped working for PI two years ago when it looked like the Populate platform was about to take off, this unfortunately has not happened. I have built promotional projects for Coca-cola, Amazon, Cinch, Sony, Bodyform and many more. A particular specialisation was delivery these in multiple languages.

Most of these sites were short shelf life so are longer available. The screen grabs are of the Cinch presents website which is the hub for all of their promotional projects.

Boyriven

An e-commerce website whose primary function is to allow potential customers to order samples of fabric. This project was through a design agency who didn't have the in house skills to complete the technical part of the build.

Sony image sensing solutions

A product inventory site for a major blue-chip. The site features a user area where certain assets are only available once the user is logged in. Other assets are available only when logged in to a user account of a certain type with extended privileges. Populate makes keeping the product information up to date easy.

Cladding configurator

The project uses the Populate platform for easy management and deployment of the product data. It features a custom PDF creation module that dynamically builds a customised brochure with the users preferred products using MPDF.

This project was designed and commissioned by CyonAgency.

Extensive

This is the standard template set I built as the starting point for our base level e-commerce site.

This particular site uses the facetted seaarch/attribute system to power a help blog. allowing the client to create help articles in a long-tail SEO approach to position pages in the natural listings. This positions content for searches such as 'how do I...' rather than simply for the products themselves, which assumes customers already know what they want. This has meant a decreased reliance on Adwords and the associated costs.