DENSO: Consumer and Commercial Automotive Web Catalog on Drupal
DENSO: Consumer and Commercial Automotive Web Catalog on Drupal
SUMMARY
DENSO North America brands came to Dogs of Design Studios, a Facet partner, for their website design update and portfolio of sites. To simplify the development and ongoing maintenance, Facet suggested Drupal as a singular site distribution template. With one site developed and produced, we could easily replicate and tweak the site’s look and feel without adding too much additional development overhead.
DENSO’s Drupal sites included DENSOAutoParts.com and DENSOHeavyDuty.com — originally launched on Drupal in 2012, both sites served as product catalogs and reference tools for consumers, distributors, and wholesalers alike.
Challenge
DENSO North America’s marketing department wanted a reusable design theme for both Auto Parts and Heavy Duty brands. Auto Parts provides OEM automotive parts for both auto manufacturers and aftermarket consumer vehicles. Heavy Duty provides OEM automotive parts for commercial vehicles. Consistency of look-and-feel required similar product catalogs and layout.
Insight
DENSO manages a wide portfolio of brands based on their participation in automotive hard parts, robotics, and other industries. DENSO North America wanted to simplify the content editing process and improve the ease of use on the site. DENSO’s marketing team wanted site updates of graphic content provided by Dogs Of Design to take less time. All things were possible within Drupal’s content management system.
Solution
Drupal 7 Best Practices
Facet implemented standard Drupal 7 best practices for DENSO sites including appropriate caching, administration tools, and Views configuration settings.
Multilingual Drupal Site Build
DENSOAutoParts.com offers English, Spanish, and French for the product catalog browsing experience. The site wasn’t fully translated so we used Drupal’s Language Neutral setting in order to create content displayed across all three languages—offering a single landing page experience for tools like Find My Part.
Drupal Distribution
After DENSOAutoParts.com was fully built, we exported the site configuration and settings to a base Drupal installation profile and created a sub-theme for DENSOHeavyDuty.com. The theme’s layout was consistent across both sites, with small updates made to certain branding elements.
Integrated eBook Catalog
DENSO’s primary goal was to support consumer and mechanic content discovery, and besides the consumer catalog on the site, DENSO needed to host various eBook catalogs for deep technical PDF content. Facet developed a custom content type to host linked eBooks in a PDF reader format that overtook the entire site theme. We customized the ebook-html.tpl.php such that standard site elements like header and footer navigation were removed in favor of an immersive PDF reader experience.
