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Company: dpivision.com Ltd
Project: Tradingeye - XHTML/CSS Shopping Cart & CMS
Dates: Sep 2007 to Mar 2008
How did the project start?
The project started as there was a huge need for an accessible XHTML/CSS compliant shopping cart which complied with the DDA. Tradingeye was one of the first applications in the world to achieve this standard.
Benefits of Accessible Website Design
* Better search engine ranking
* Faster loading pages
* Increased market share
* UK DDA & US Section 508 compliant
* Lower hosting & maintenance costs
Jim Byrne, founder of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers, said: "Dpivision are to be applauded for demonstrating that an e-commerce website can look great and be accessible.
They have clearly put a lot of work and effort into trying to ensure potential customers are not locked out from the online shopping experience - which is a lesson for other vendors in the market."
What options did you consider?
We needed to build up a community around the product and have both a Shopping Cart & CMS. Tradingeye is open source and can be totally customised and has been adopted by business from around the world.
What help and expertise did you receive?
We received help and expertise from many leading industry experts such as Jim Byrne founder of the Guild of Accessible Web Designers and Andy Clark from Stuff and Nonsense, a published author and speaker at international conferences who is also an invited expert to the W3C's CSS Working Group.
Andy Clark from Stuff and Nonsense said: "Finally designers and developers have what they want: a standards-based, highly accessible and professional ecommerce solution that has fewer limitations than anything we have seen so far."
"Tradingeye came to my attention again after being highly recommended by a number of my friends and colleagues. The flexibility of its templates, as well as the developers' keenness to work with the standards community to continue to improve them, impressed me. Added to this the sheer depth of their product and its ability to already integrate with Sage and Act!, both popular business packages, peaked my interest."
"In all my dealings with them I have been so pleased at the attitude and responsiveness of the team at dpvision, the company behind Tradingeye, that I will be helping them in the future; as I know will be a number of my accessibility specialist colleagues, to make Tradingeye's markup even more flexible and accessible."
Did you face any challenges or learn any lessons?
The software had to both be usable, search engine friendly and accessible. We also had Tradingeye usability tested by Codeworks and the University of Sunderland as well actual physical testing using software application such as JAWS, one of the leading screen reader solutions on the market.
What are the outcomes and how has it improved your business?
Tradingeye has sold over 1000 licenses and we have an ever growing community with over 3000 posts on our forum in the last 3 months.
What are your plans for the future?
Our next major release of Tradingeye is due out in the third quarter of this year with exiting features like language packs, products attributes and a link to EBay.
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