Richard Theo's Blog

The suite of new utellus web sites which i have developed for utellus ltd, have gone live today.

• http://www.utellus.co.uk
  Allows members of the public to submit feedback or complaints to any supplier in the UK. This is a public customer facing site, which retains the same style as before. The site employs some neat AJAX features developed using the ASP.NET Ajax framework - try out the supplier organisation selector on the home page (on the right).
  
• https://ssp.utellus.co.uk/portal
  The secure supplier portal, which allows supplier organisations to login securely (using HTTPS / SSL) and respond to feedback cases and complaints. This was the meat of the development and provides management functions for the utellus site. It offers 4 security levels or roles with different capabilities. Utellus staff (administrators) can set up industry sectors, organisations, services, approve new organisation requests (from both organisations and as part of new feedback submissions for unlisted organisations), monitor the audit trail, customers, etc. Supplier Administrators can setup the services listed on the main site against their organisation, manage staff in their organisation and their roles in logging in to the portal to respond to customer feedback cases against particular services etc, create questions and customised questionnaires that will be presented to customers who select their organisation to send feedback to.
  
• http://www.utellus.eu
  International site - with simple informational content
  
• http://blog.utellus.co.uk/
  Location for utellus staff to post interesting articles about their experiences of customers service
  

The development has taken about 2 months and has been an interesting introduction to the all new Microsoft Visual Studio .NET 2008 and ASP.NET 3.5. 

I'm pretty impressed with this suite and in particular the LINQ to SQL functionality. Its allowed me to develop a suite of sites including the supplier portal (which unfortunately you can't try out without a subscribing account). The portal is where 90% of the energy has gone

The Beauty2u ecommerce site has gone live today after 2 months of development. This is a state of the art ecommerce site who's USP is that it offers a very focussed range of leading british beauty product brands. The site is based on BV Commerce 5 SP2 ecommerce suite. I spent a few weeks reviewing and selecting the right eCommerce suite and despite that, missed many negatives about BVC although overall its a good system.

Beauty2u is owned and run by my wife Katrina's company KleverStuff Ltd which is a marketing consultancy specialising in beauty products. For more info see their website.