Building a stylish, secure and stable site with Umbraco

Circuit had a clear vision for a stable site with a modern design and manageable CMS. A tight five-month timescale was put in place in preparation for their busiest registration period, with the aim to launch the site prior to Freshers Week.

Priding themselves on delivering convenient laundry services, Circuit hoped the site redesign would clarify their offering, reducing complaints and queries while making top-ups a straightforward process. The site, originally built in Wordpress, was unstable and crashed on a regular basis. Unable to cope with the influx of new users in September – up to 20,000 per day – lack of stability and reoccurring security issues became the key drivers to replatform to Umbraco. Circuit were also keen to highlight their ‘How-to-guides’, FAQs and CircuitView, a popular ‘live usage’ feature used by students which also helps the brand sell to other universities.

To meet the budget and build a modern, easy-to-manage website, Umbraco was the perfect choice. The free Open Source licence allowed Circuit to focus their budget on the bespoke development and design work required to bring their site to life. Empowering Circuit’s in-house team, our UI engineers provided them with the ability to make small front-end development changes so they can act fast on required changes.

Due to the high volume of users and focus on stability, the majority of work centred around hosting infrastructure and load testing. To ensure their Umbraco 8 site could cope with increased traffic, we implemented a significant amount of load testing to ensure, even under an unrealistic load, the site would still perform at its best.

With stability no longer an issue, we began work redesigning and rebuilding the site. NetConstruct’s UI and Design teams worked closely on the project focusing on animations to inject personality into the pages. Illustrations make the ‘how to’ guides simple to follow and created a fun and memorable 404 page.

A handful of integrations with third-party systems helped bolster the website performance even further. Designing a site that would appeal to Circuit’s student target audience was fundamental to success so third-party logins for Google and Facebook were integrated to speed up the registration process. Payment integrations including PayPal, ESD and Greenwald were used to make the laundry top-up service simple and quick. A third party offering called Lutrons was also integrated, allowing users to view a 2D or 3D version of their selected laundry room and the current status of the machines.

Circuit’s new, stable site launched on time before the first term began. Since go-live, the website hasn’t experienced any downtime and transactions have substantially increased.