Prodigy Computación

Web Design, 2014

Prodigy Computación was one of the largest PC component shops in Mexico. The website existed as a mean to list the shop's product categories, the current prices of the various PC components and the prices needed to be updated regularly because of the fluctuating exchange rate between the Mexican Peso and the USD.

Prodigy's website was originally built with Joomla, it wasn't responsive or even mobile friendly at all, and it took up to 10 seconds to load each page.

Redesign

My main motivation was to provide a clean, non-bloated, up-to-date new design for Prodigy. The previous website was grey, dull, it had small low-contrast fonts everywhere, and there wasn't any visual hierarchy.

A new menu

The new menu does not need you to click it anymore, it adds a link in the logo to take you back to the root page, and it's divided into four main sections: Computers, Parts, Network, and Contact. Each section has a sub-menu with quick-links to all the sections the website had, cleanly organized with icons to help you understand where you are and what you're looking at.

The Sidebar

The sidebar is hidden in small screens, it clearly separates info into multiple sections with clear titles and relevant general information that can be shown on all pages, this includes links to payment forms, shipping, support, and the privacy notice.

Price Lists

The price lists were the most important part of Prodigy's website, it was how people looking for PC parts could find what they were looking for in Mexico (please note that Amazon arrived in Mexico until 2 years later), how much did each part cost and they would only find different stores via Google. Having an up to date price list and clear categories were the main way customers could decide if they were buying from Prodigy or someone else.

Having a price list with no pages for each product made sense back then, users already knew the thing they were looking for and were also tech-savvy.

The new lists were way cleaner, had a more easy to read typeface, and have rows that are easy to distinguish from each other compared to the previous website.

New footer, clearly laid out information.

New UI elements

Migrate everything to Jekyll

The previous website did not use any source control software, information was easily lost with manual changes.

I wrote a Python script that read the master Excel file where all the prices were stored, and this, divided by categories, resulted in the effective reduction of time to update all prices on the website from 2-3 business days down to 90 minutes of work. Prior to this change, the task of updating all prices on the website was done by a person every 2 weeks and risked the prices being too out of date. With the new workflow prices were updated once a week, sometimes twice if the exchange rate was moving too quickly.

The script relied on a custom document format that took the title for each section and generated all the HTML tables for all product categories, this generated HTML could simply be pasted into the Jekyll project, the site could be generated and deployed again, and have the new prices on the website.