Brian McMurray - Interactive (and) Web Developer

Alan Ross Machinery is North America's largest inventory of used and new scrap handling and recycling machinery. For their most recent redesign project, they chose to develop a Drupal site and hired a freelance developer to build the site. The developer hardly completed implementing the design into a Drupal theme before disappearing completely. Left with a non-functioning website, Alan Ross asked the Iona Group to repair and finish implementing the site. Alan Ross already managed their product catalog through a custom-built ColdFusion web application which integrated with an custom-built customer relationship management system. Alan Ross needed their main website to be fed the data from their product catalog dynamically and also to be able to track the activities of visitors on the site in their CRM software.

The site builds and caches its product listings from the product catalog through pinging a custom API built to return product information in XML. When a site visitor performs an action such as filling out one of the many request forms, the tracking system kicks in and the user's search activity and future form requests are tracked and reported back to the CRM software. This allows Alan Ross' sales staff to get an accurate picture of their customer's interests and more effectively buy and sell product.