XO Wheels is one of Florida's best luxury wheels provider and VEONIA's expertise was called in to bring to life a concept of exclusivity and to project an upscale image, that is at the same time, captivating and interactive. Another requirement was to be able to make the concept social-spreadable via Facebook.
We came up with a very interesing idea. Being able to configure the wheel via a tic-tac-toe styled widget, that allows visitors to:
All this selecting is done via scrolling on the horizontal, vertical or the two diagonals. Once a model is rendered in the center space of the widget, a visitor ca do the following:
The website is a premium-looking online catalog, that features, putting the homepage aside, a cool featured product presentation, via the "Collection" area.
Here, one can see the wheel models along with the information about sizes, available finishes, available lip colors and cap styles, as well as different photos of the wheel. Last but not least, is the angle rotator, a widget on the collection page that allows you to tilt the wheel at different angles.
Another cool spot on the site is the Photo Gallery, a place where people can see different photo galleries of different car makes and models, sorting them by the featured wheel in each gallery.
The back-end, what's going on behind the scenes, powering this entire system is somewhat of an innovation.
Why is that? Well, because we needed to deal with two simultaneous guidelines, that kinda went against each other:
We managed to keep the home page widget to run smoothly by limiting the database access to only get the names of all models, respective finishes, lip colors and cap style, ONE TIME, at start-up. The images are all retrieved WITHOUT accessing the database (thus reducing access times), via a smart image filename system, due to which all possible wheel/lip/cap combination pictures have unique, very logical filenames.
At the other end, extending the database by adding new models, finishes, lips and cap is easily done in the admin by adding the details and uploading the photos required for the home page widget and Collection pages.
Another cool feature of the back-end is that it allows the administrator to update the Photo Gallery by adding car makes and models and then photo galleries to fit these cars.